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posted by janrinok on Tuesday September 24 2019, @09:35PM   Printer-friendly
from the did-they,-didn't-they dept.

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow2718

IBM and Google's race for quantum computing takes a mysterious turn

The battle for top-dog status in the emerging field of quantum computing took a strange turn last week when rivals IBM and Google both made important and—in Google's case—mysterious claims about where they are in a quest that most experts believe is still at least a decade away from the finish line.

IBM announced that it will add its 14th quantum computer to its fleet in October. This will be a new 53-qubit model which it says is the single largest universal quantum system made available for external access in the industry to date. IBM also announced the opening of the first IBM Quantum Computation Center in Poughkeepsie, NY, bringing the number of quantum computing systems available online via its IBM Q Experience platform to 10, with an additional four systems scheduled to come online in the next month.

Meanwhile, Google scientists posted, and then quickly took down, a research paper on a NASA web site that claimed that it had achieved a major milestone called "quantum supremacy," meaning it can solve problems that even the most powerful conventional supercomputers cannot.

According to a report in the FT, the report claimed that Google's 72-qubit quantum computer chip Bristlecone, introduced in March 2018, performed a calculation in just over 3 minutes that would take 10,000 years on IBM's Summit, the world's most powerful commercial computer. The report reportedly said:

To our knowledge, this experiment marks the first computation that can only be performed on a quantum processor.

If true, this would be a very big step in the advance toward quantum computing, but it appears that the researchers may have gotten a little too far out over their skis and the post was quickly taken down. Since then, Google PR and marketing has refused to discuss the topic and the paper has gone the way of the whistleblower's account of President Trump's phone call with Ukraine's president. In a puff of digital smoke.

[...] For all the kerfuffle and analyst excitement, we are some distance away from a quantum advantage. Most experts believe the first quantum computer that can do the miraculous things its advocates promise is still a decade off but that hasn't stopped IBM, Microsoft, Google, AT&T, and other heavyweights from pressing ahead in a race that represents the next Mt. Everest of computing challenges. As with the sudden disappearance of claims of 'supremacy,' keep on the lookout for more strange and mysterious turns before we get there.


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 25 2019, @07:16PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 25 2019, @07:16PM (#898703)

    maybe the only mistake was that the google scientists spilled the googly beans? maybe the article got pulled, not because it was incorrect, but b/c google doesn't want any eyes/heat.