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IBM unveils its first commercial quantum computer
At CES, IBM today announced its first commercial quantum computer for use outside of the lab. The 20-qubit system combines into a single package the quantum and classical computing parts it takes to use a machine like this for research and business applications. That package, the IBM Q system, is still huge, of course, but it includes everything a company would need to get started with its quantum computing experiments, including all the machinery necessary to cool the quantum computing hardware.
While IBM describes it as the first fully integrated universal quantum computing system designed for scientific and commercial use, it's worth stressing that a 20-qubit machine is nowhere near powerful enough for most of the commercial applications that people envision for a quantum computer with more qubits — and qubits that are useful for more than 100 microseconds. It's no surprise then, that IBM stresses that this is a first attempt and that the systems are "designed to one day tackle problems that are currently seen as too complex and exponential in nature for classical systems to handle." Right now, we're not quite there yet, but the company also notes that these systems are upgradable (and easy to maintain).
Quantum computers are real things, right?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by exaeta on Thursday January 10 2019, @02:09AM (8 children)
The Government is a Bird
(Score: 3, Funny) by bob_super on Thursday January 10 2019, @02:24AM (1 child)
Get some real dollars from sales, while being, by the admission of its own manufacturer, not much of a computer.
(Score: 2) by Nerdfest on Thursday January 10 2019, @03:19PM
IBM still bends people over for renting hardware from them in the classical computer world. It would be hard to imagine them charging *more* obscene amounts for this.
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 10 2019, @02:44AM (1 child)
Found the techie who didnt care about college!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 10 2019, @06:36PM
Found the poster who didn't care about reality.
(Score: 2) by Knowledge Troll on Thursday January 10 2019, @04:36AM (2 children)
I can't wrap my head around how to program a quantum computer and I've done some reading and watched some lectures. I don't feel too bad though because even quantum computer programmers admit it is difficult to construct a program to answer a question when the program has to have the answer inside it and you don't know it yet.
Lets see a classical computer explode a head like that! Deadlocks and race conditions? Pfffft.
Fuck those things are weird.
(Score: 4, Informative) by JoeMerchant on Thursday January 10 2019, @02:44PM (1 child)
Have you tried the online IBM Q stuff? Lots of info, plus opportunity for actual hands-on-ish experimentation there. If I ever get inspired enough I'd like to take the time to implement one of the superposition examples, just to see it happen.
Also, if you read just a bit in the FAQ, you'll find quite a bit of debunking about the speedup potential - there's reference to an algorithm that's O^N in classical computers that can be reduced to O^N/2 by quantum methods, but that's about as good as it gets.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by Knowledge Troll on Friday January 11 2019, @12:47AM
Thank you for the info. I totally see your point in playing with a superposition just for fun. It's not like I'm going to manage entangled photons any other way and basically playing with an entangled photon is ultra cool.
It reminds me of how I can use a machine to play with really really small time intervals: a micro controller and specifically the timer/counter unit. By writing simple programs you can play with time values down in the microseconds. Also very very cool.
I wonder how long it takes to get the atmega328p of quantum computers?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 10 2019, @08:26PM
Shor's Algorithm -- factoring integers in polynomial time.
Fortunately the size of the integers to be factored is bound by the number of qubits. But we should be rethinking our public-key cryptography methods regardless.