6 ms·

IBM Building First Universal Quantum Computers for Business and Science

100 points by socialjulio 10y ago

wzeng 10y ago
This is great! There's a really cool ecosystem of Python tools for quantum computers that's coming out. Check them out if you'd like to learn more about quantum programming: IBM's API: https://github.com/IBM/qiskit-sdk-py https://github.com/IBM/qiskit-sdk-py Rigetti Computing's Forest: http://forest.rigetti.com/ http://forest.rigetti.com/ https://github.com/rigetticomputing/pyquil https://github.com/rigetticomputing/pyquil ProjectQ: http://projectq.ch/ http://projectq.ch/ We added a really basic introduction to quantum programming into Forest that you might enjoy: http://pyquil.readthedocs.io/en/latest/intro_to_qc.html http://pyquil.readthedocs.io/en/latest/intro_to_qc.html
Gupie 10y ago
This is in the first paragraph: "Quantum computers will deliver solutions to important problems where patterns cannot be seen because the data doesn’t exist ..." It then goes on the say: " and the possibilities that you need to explore to get to the answer are too enormous to ever be processed by classical computers" I can understand how the second statement could be true but the first! Can someone explain how the first statement could be correct, or is the guy who wrote the sentence talking nonsense? How can you find patterns in data that you do not have?
- alnitak 10y ago
  They could be referring to simulations instead of inferring based on existing data sets.
- petters 10y ago
  The second statement is misleading at best. It suggests that QCs are some sort of parallel/faster classical computers.
  - akvadrako 10y ago
    That is (roughly) one way to look at it and actually the interpretation that David Deutsch thought brought the most clarity. He was the first to describe a quantum Turing machine.
- coldcode 10y ago
  Superimposition of marketing fluff.
- rbanffy 10y ago
  Every time they don't have the data, they are superimposed with another state where they do.
6nf 10y ago
Fluff piece. There's no indication that they know how to build a real QC.
- rspeer 10y ago
  The part that made me certain this is more a marketing effort than a technical effort is when they described it as a followup to "Watson" and "blockchain". "Watson" is currently a brand name for a bunch of miscellaneous NLP consulting, capitalizing on a fact that they made a very specific NLP system for answering Jeopardy questions that won on Jeopardy. The fact that the name is famous, but businesses are not actually looking to answer trivia questions, has required some marketing contortions. "Blockchain" is, for one thing, a bunch of neat mathematics. It's also an enterprise fad that involves ignoring the neat mathematics. The logic for the fad is something like this: Bitcoin made a ton of money by decentralizing money, evading currency controls, wasting power, and selling drugs. We want to make a ton of money too! We'd rather not decentralize anything, piss off governments, increase our electric bill, or sell drugs, but maybe there's something else in there that makes money. Whatever that is, let's call it "blockchain". I don't see a coherent category that includes Watson, blockchain, and quantum, as the author of this press release believes exists. But if I had to extrapolate: IBM will provide an API for running a vaguely-related set of algorithms. The entire API will actually run on classical computers, but some of it will involve quantum simulators. They will leverage the confusion about where the quantum part is to sell consulting to companies where a manager has put the cart before the horse and decided they need some quantum right now.
  - juliendorra 10y ago
    "I don't see a coherent category that includes Watson, blockchain, and quantum, as the author of this press release believes exists." Magical algorithms that solve everything, supposedly. The target audience is most probably decision makers who want a business edge and not technical people.
  - kitd 10y ago
    Bitcoin is based on a blockchain process, but other applications could be as well. Blockchain exists as a separate concept. Not unreasonable to expect companies to commercialise it.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
HeavenBanned 10y ago
Does this mean programming paradigms will be changed? Will I have to learn a new language that's oriented towards Quantum Computing? Or is this something the computer handles regardless of the higher-level language?
- douche 10y ago
  Probably not, because 10-1 this is another IBM vaporware announcement that will never amount to anything.
tbrowbdidnso 10y ago
Can somebody tell me something cool IBM actually does for real besides run softlayer? I'm so tired of endless waves of marketing bullshit with no substance. At least when most companies announce something it's a tangible product I can actually expect to use at a non ambiguous point in the future
- apapli 10y ago
  Genuine question - where do you consider softlayer to be "cool"? Or even relevant anymore - I always saw them as an "also ran" up against a big Azure and a much, much bigger AWS.
- pyromine 10y ago
  Ever heard the phrase "Nobody gets fired for buying IBM"? IBM is massive in IT consulting with basically half their revenue coming from the consulting side of their business, and the rest they're a service company in a lot of different IT verticals. A somewhat informative quora link, because if you were too lazy to even google this you probably won't dig deeper than this: https://www.quora.com/What-does-IBM-do https://www.quora.com/What-does-IBM-do
  - tbrowbdidnso 10y ago
    Does that change anything I said? All this marketing doesn't seem to lead to anything tangible unlike similar releases from other big companies. It's just fluff. I'm aware the IBM does consulting and that's possibly the most boring software realm there is.
    - TuringNYC 10y ago
      It might be boring, but it is revenue. Secondly, we should all be happy that companies like IBM (and of course Google, Facebook, Microsoft) are taking a long view and investing into cool ideas which may not necessarily immediately result in something tangible. The quarter-to-quarter view taken by most public companies is not optimal for society. BTW, I work in ML+Medicine and IBM has dont great work in the area, with some Production implementations at hospitals.
moab 10y ago
Marketing at IBM should read up before writing illuminating sentences like "...quantum computers will deliver solutions to important problems where patterns cannot be seen because the data doesn’t exist and the possibilities that you need to explore to get to the answer are too enormous to ever be processed by classical computers." Necessary reading (read by my high-school age cousins, so your marketers should be able to grok it) http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/The_Limits_of_Quantum_Computers.pdf http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/The_Limits_of_Quantum_Com...
- RobertoG 10y ago
  I think this is one of those cases where the inverse Hanlon's Razor applies: "Avoid attribute to stupidity that which is adequately explained by malice"
  - Chyzwar 10y ago
    "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon's_razor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon's_razor
- yalooze 10y ago
  Has our knowledge of quantum computers changed much in the last 9 years since that Scientific American article was written? ie. Is there anything more recent worth reading? Or it's all still completely valid?
- blueyes 10y ago
  IBM's PR in AI and now this is nauseating. They are discrediting the tech industry by repeatedly promising more than they can deliver. I wonder if their PR team even speaks with their engineers, who must be cringing.
bitmapbrother 10y ago
The picture is a bit old as those two ladies have been replaced with offshore workers.
- scott_s 10y ago
  I work in the same building. The above statement is not true.
DeepYogurt 10y ago
This seems to be the programming reference https://quantumexperience.ng.bluemix.net/qstage/#/tutorial?sectionId=75a85f7e14ae3fd4329ad5c3e59466ea&pageIndex=3 https://quantumexperience.ng.bluemix.net/qstage/#/tutorial?s... You need an account to use the editor.
partycoder 10y ago
My limited understanding of quantum computers is that they excel at solving optimization problems, as well as problems such as integer factorization (e.g: Shor's algorithm), which is the basis for many cryptographic systems. Now, in practice, the largest number factored using a quantum computer is very small (56,153), which is minuscule compared to the large numbers used by some standards (such as the controversial p and q numbers from Dual_EC_DRBG provided by NIST).
kriro 10y ago
Hanhee Paik has (co-)published the following papers in 2016: * Experimental Demonstration of a Resonator-Induced Phase Gate in a Multiqubit Circuit-QED System * System and method for quantum information transfer between optical photons and superconductive qubits * Rapid Driven Reset of a Qubit Readout Resonator * Characterization of the resonator induced phase gate * Demonstrating Multi-Qubit Operations in a Superconducting 3D circuit QED Architecture Patents: Cavity filtered qubit Source: https://scholar.google.de/citations?hl=de&user=lHEtpUUAAAAJ&view_op=list_works&sortby=pubdate https://scholar.google.de/citations?hl=de&user=lHEtpUUAAAAJ&...
nagyf 10y ago
How is it possible, that IBM wants to build a commercial quantum computer with 50 qubits in a _few years_, while there is a Canadian company that just released a 2048 qubit commercial quantum computer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D-Wave_Systems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D-Wave_Systems I'm not an expert, please someone explain me. Is IBM's stuff is different somehow?
- dayaz36 10y ago
  I'm wondering the same thing
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- bdav 10y ago
  D-Wave is not an universal quantum computer. It only performs quantum annealing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_annealing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_annealing IMB's computer should be able to execute quantum algorithms such as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shor's_algorithm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shor's_algorithm to break RSA
  - nagyf 10y ago
    Thanks for clarifying, I understand now.
- rdtsc 10y ago
  I am pretty sure they are aware of D-Wave. There are not that many quantum computers on the market. Surely you read the wikipedia link you posted as well :-) because it says there: --- The study found that the D-Wave chip "produced no quantum speedup" and did not rule out the possibility in future tests.[62] The researchers, led by Matthias Troyer at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, found "no quantum speedup" across the entire range of their tests, and only inconclusive results when looking at subsets of the tests. ---
mtgx 10y ago
Recent story: Google plans to commercialize quantum technologies in 5 years: http://www.nature.com/news/commercialize-quantum-technologies-in-five-years-1.21583 http://www.nature.com/news/commercialize-quantum-technologie...
et1975 10y ago
There's also MSR Liqui|> that lets you program simulations in F# https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/language-integrated-quantum-operations-liqui https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/language-in...

100 points by socialjulio 10y ago

wzeng 10y ago

This is great! There's a really cool ecosystem of Python tools for quantum computers that's coming out. Check them out if you'd like to learn more about quantum programming: IBM's API: https://github.com/IBM/qiskit-sdk-py https://github.com/IBM/qiskit-sdk-py Rigetti Computing's Forest: http://forest.rigetti.com/ http://forest.rigetti.com/ https://github.com/rigetticomputing/pyquil https://github.com/rigetticomputing/pyquil ProjectQ: http://projectq.ch/ http://projectq.ch/ We added a really basic introduction to quantum programming into Forest that you might enjoy: http://pyquil.readthedocs.io/en/latest/intro_to_qc.html http://pyquil.readthedocs.io/en/latest/intro_to_qc.html

Gupie 10y ago

This is in the first paragraph: "Quantum computers will deliver solutions to important problems where patterns cannot be seen because the data doesn’t exist ..." It then goes on the say: " and the possibilities that you need to explore to get to the answer are too enormous to ever be processed by classical computers" I can understand how the second statement could be true but the first! Can someone explain how the first statement could be correct, or is the guy who wrote the sentence talking nonsense? How can you find patterns in data that you do not have?

alnitak 10y ago
They could be referring to simulations instead of inferring based on existing data sets.
petters 10y ago
The second statement is misleading at best. It suggests that QCs are some sort of parallel/faster classical computers.
- akvadrako 10y ago
  That is (roughly) one way to look at it and actually the interpretation that David Deutsch thought brought the most clarity. He was the first to describe a quantum Turing machine.
coldcode 10y ago
Superimposition of marketing fluff.
rbanffy 10y ago
Every time they don't have the data, they are superimposed with another state where they do.

6nf 10y ago

Fluff piece. There's no indication that they know how to build a real QC.

rspeer 10y ago
The part that made me certain this is more a marketing effort than a technical effort is when they described it as a followup to "Watson" and "blockchain". "Watson" is currently a brand name for a bunch of miscellaneous NLP consulting, capitalizing on a fact that they made a very specific NLP system for answering Jeopardy questions that won on Jeopardy. The fact that the name is famous, but businesses are not actually looking to answer trivia questions, has required some marketing contortions. "Blockchain" is, for one thing, a bunch of neat mathematics. It's also an enterprise fad that involves ignoring the neat mathematics. The logic for the fad is something like this: Bitcoin made a ton of money by decentralizing money, evading currency controls, wasting power, and selling drugs. We want to make a ton of money too! We'd rather not decentralize anything, piss off governments, increase our electric bill, or sell drugs, but maybe there's something else in there that makes money. Whatever that is, let's call it "blockchain". I don't see a coherent category that includes Watson, blockchain, and quantum, as the author of this press release believes exists. But if I had to extrapolate: IBM will provide an API for running a vaguely-related set of algorithms. The entire API will actually run on classical computers, but some of it will involve quantum simulators. They will leverage the confusion about where the quantum part is to sell consulting to companies where a manager has put the cart before the horse and decided they need some quantum right now.
- juliendorra 10y ago
  "I don't see a coherent category that includes Watson, blockchain, and quantum, as the author of this press release believes exists." Magical algorithms that solve everything, supposedly. The target audience is most probably decision makers who want a business edge and not technical people.
- kitd 10y ago
  Bitcoin is based on a blockchain process, but other applications could be as well. Blockchain exists as a separate concept. Not unreasonable to expect companies to commercialise it.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

HeavenBanned 10y ago

Does this mean programming paradigms will be changed? Will I have to learn a new language that's oriented towards Quantum Computing? Or is this something the computer handles regardless of the higher-level language?

douche 10y ago
Probably not, because 10-1 this is another IBM vaporware announcement that will never amount to anything.

tbrowbdidnso 10y ago

Can somebody tell me something cool IBM actually does for real besides run softlayer? I'm so tired of endless waves of marketing bullshit with no substance. At least when most companies announce something it's a tangible product I can actually expect to use at a non ambiguous point in the future

apapli 10y ago
Genuine question - where do you consider softlayer to be "cool"? Or even relevant anymore - I always saw them as an "also ran" up against a big Azure and a much, much bigger AWS.
pyromine 10y ago
Ever heard the phrase "Nobody gets fired for buying IBM"? IBM is massive in IT consulting with basically half their revenue coming from the consulting side of their business, and the rest they're a service company in a lot of different IT verticals. A somewhat informative quora link, because if you were too lazy to even google this you probably won't dig deeper than this: https://www.quora.com/What-does-IBM-do https://www.quora.com/What-does-IBM-do
- tbrowbdidnso 10y ago
  Does that change anything I said? All this marketing doesn't seem to lead to anything tangible unlike similar releases from other big companies. It's just fluff. I'm aware the IBM does consulting and that's possibly the most boring software realm there is.
  - TuringNYC 10y ago
    It might be boring, but it is revenue. Secondly, we should all be happy that companies like IBM (and of course Google, Facebook, Microsoft) are taking a long view and investing into cool ideas which may not necessarily immediately result in something tangible. The quarter-to-quarter view taken by most public companies is not optimal for society. BTW, I work in ML+Medicine and IBM has dont great work in the area, with some Production implementations at hospitals.

moab 10y ago

Marketing at IBM should read up before writing illuminating sentences like "...quantum computers will deliver solutions to important problems where patterns cannot be seen because the data doesn’t exist and the possibilities that you need to explore to get to the answer are too enormous to ever be processed by classical computers." Necessary reading (read by my high-school age cousins, so your marketers should be able to grok it) http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/The_Limits_of_Quantum_Computers.pdf http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/The_Limits_of_Quantum_Com...

RobertoG 10y ago
I think this is one of those cases where the inverse Hanlon's Razor applies: "Avoid attribute to stupidity that which is adequately explained by malice"
- Chyzwar 10y ago
  "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon's_razor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon's_razor
yalooze 10y ago
Has our knowledge of quantum computers changed much in the last 9 years since that Scientific American article was written? ie. Is there anything more recent worth reading? Or it's all still completely valid?
blueyes 10y ago
IBM's PR in AI and now this is nauseating. They are discrediting the tech industry by repeatedly promising more than they can deliver. I wonder if their PR team even speaks with their engineers, who must be cringing.

bitmapbrother 10y ago

The picture is a bit old as those two ladies have been replaced with offshore workers.

scott_s 10y ago
I work in the same building. The above statement is not true.

DeepYogurt 10y ago

This seems to be the programming reference https://quantumexperience.ng.bluemix.net/qstage/#/tutorial?sectionId=75a85f7e14ae3fd4329ad5c3e59466ea&pageIndex=3 https://quantumexperience.ng.bluemix.net/qstage/#/tutorial?s... You need an account to use the editor.

partycoder 10y ago

My limited understanding of quantum computers is that they excel at solving optimization problems, as well as problems such as integer factorization (e.g: Shor's algorithm), which is the basis for many cryptographic systems. Now, in practice, the largest number factored using a quantum computer is very small (56,153), which is minuscule compared to the large numbers used by some standards (such as the controversial p and q numbers from Dual_EC_DRBG provided by NIST).

kriro 10y ago

Hanhee Paik has (co-)published the following papers in 2016: * Experimental Demonstration of a Resonator-Induced Phase Gate in a Multiqubit Circuit-QED System * System and method for quantum information transfer between optical photons and superconductive qubits * Rapid Driven Reset of a Qubit Readout Resonator * Characterization of the resonator induced phase gate * Demonstrating Multi-Qubit Operations in a Superconducting 3D circuit QED Architecture Patents: Cavity filtered qubit Source: https://scholar.google.de/citations?hl=de&user=lHEtpUUAAAAJ&view_op=list_works&sortby=pubdate https://scholar.google.de/citations?hl=de&user=lHEtpUUAAAAJ&...

nagyf 10y ago

How is it possible, that IBM wants to build a commercial quantum computer with 50 qubits in a _few years_, while there is a Canadian company that just released a 2048 qubit commercial quantum computer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D-Wave_Systems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D-Wave_Systems I'm not an expert, please someone explain me. Is IBM's stuff is different somehow?

dayaz36 10y ago
I'm wondering the same thing
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
bdav 10y ago
D-Wave is not an universal quantum computer. It only performs quantum annealing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_annealing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_annealing IMB's computer should be able to execute quantum algorithms such as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shor's_algorithm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shor's_algorithm to break RSA
- nagyf 10y ago
  Thanks for clarifying, I understand now.
rdtsc 10y ago
I am pretty sure they are aware of D-Wave. There are not that many quantum computers on the market. Surely you read the wikipedia link you posted as well :-) because it says there: --- The study found that the D-Wave chip "produced no quantum speedup" and did not rule out the possibility in future tests.[62] The researchers, led by Matthias Troyer at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, found "no quantum speedup" across the entire range of their tests, and only inconclusive results when looking at subsets of the tests. ---

mtgx 10y ago

Recent story: Google plans to commercialize quantum technologies in 5 years: http://www.nature.com/news/commercialize-quantum-technologies-in-five-years-1.21583 http://www.nature.com/news/commercialize-quantum-technologie...

et1975 10y ago

There's also MSR Liqui|> that lets you program simulations in F# https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/language-integrated-quantum-operations-liqui https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/language-in...