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IBM Q system in development with working 50 qubit processor
- mtgx 9y agoGood job, IBM. You may actually be ahead of other tech companies for once, although Google seems to be breathing down your neck in this area. Others seem to be at least a generation or two behind. One other thing to note is that until recently it was believed that 50-qubit quantum computer would achieve "quantum supremacy". However, IBM itself has shown that we can simulate 56-qubits on a classical supercomputer. https://www.ibm.com/blogs/research/2017/10/quantum-computing-barrier/ https://www.ibm.com/blogs/research/2017/10/quantum-computing... Now let's see who gets to the 100-qubit quantum computer first and achieves quantum supremacy. Going by recent developments, quantum computers seem to be following a "Moore's Law" of sorts, where their number of qubits pretty much double every two years. We need a few more generations to be sure of this, but it does look like this is the rate at which they are going to evolve. D-Wave, which isn't a universal quantum computer, has in fact been evolving at 2-4x every 2 years (closer to 2x for last few generations). This is exciting because unlike classical computers, quantum computers increase their performance by much more than 2x if their number of qubits double every 2 years.
- bencollier49 9y agoVery exciting, agree - although important to mention: > unlike classical computers, quantum computers increase their performance by much more than 2x ...for particular tasks.
- ISL 9y agoSome of those tasks are transformative!
- Cyph0n 9y ago> You may actually be ahead of other tech companies for once IBM Research is and always has been an industrial research powerhouse. I doubt you could name a company that has contributed so much to so many different fields over the past few decades (Bell Labs is the universal exception). From [1]: "IBM Research's numerous contributions to physical and computer sciences include the Scanning Tunneling Microscope and high temperature superconductivity, both of which were awarded the Nobel Prize. IBM Research was behind the inventions of the SABRE travel reservation system, the technology of laser eye surgery, magnetic storage, the relational database, UPC barcodes and Watson, the question-answering computing system that won a match against human champions on the Jeopardy! television quiz show." [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Research https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Research
- derwiki 9y ago> won a match against human champions on the Jeopardy! television quiz show. I'm _much_ more impressed by Google's AI Go champion. And besides Watson, what has IBM Research done in the past 20 years? Personally I would have thought they'd be more involved in self-driving cars. (Disclaimer: I interned for IBM Research 10 years ago)
- Cyph0n 9y agoIBM isn't a software-only company: they do research in advanced materials and semiconductor physics, low-level computer architecture, integrated circuit testing, and so on. When you look at the bigger picture, IBM Research has been doing amazing things.
- derwiki 9y agoWhat stands out to you in the last 20 years?
- Cyph0n 9y agoIBM has been awarded more patents per year than any other company for the last 24 years[1]. In 2016 alone, IBM published ~22 patents per day, and ended up being ~2500 patents ahead of Samsung (#2). [1]: http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/51353.wss http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/51353.wss
- bob_theslob646 9y agoDoes that necessarily mean that is impressive?( I know it is, I am just asking for someone who may not understand what having that type of scale of IP enables a company to do.)
- derwiki 9y agoProtective war chest: don't sue me, I probably own a patent you're infringing upon. At least my lawyers will make it seem so.
- rbanffy 9y agoI look forward to supercool (no pun intended) qSeries mainframes and whatever wild OSs they'll run. Right now, it looks like it's a batch processing like thing, with a single problem using the machine at any given time with long setup/teardown times.
- Zaak 9y agoI expect quantum computers will always run in batch mode. Storing quantum state in classical memory is impossible, so task switching would be very problematic.
- rbanffy 9y agoWe can try to partition the machine so your process can use some qubits and mine uses others. I suppose a classical computer would be running the OS, at least at first.
- Zaak 9y agoYeah, if you have a 5000-qubit computer and two people want to run 2000-qubit jobs, I can see them being able to run simultaneously. There will always need to be a classical computer running the quantum computer.
- rbanffy 9y ago> There will always need to be a classical computer running the quantum computer. Not sure about the need, but it sure is convenient. Quantum computers are not always better for all kinds of problems and being able to route different jobs to different parts of the system should be an advantage. All this looks a lot like a digitally controlled analog computer or something that can program FPGAs on-the-fly.
- Zaak 9y agoA digitally controlled analog computer is a good analogy. One big limitation of quantum computers is that they can't erase information without losing their quantumness. So simple things like if-then statements become impossible (you'd have to execute both branches every time).
- forapurpose 9y agoIBM also plans to offer a 20-qubit hosted service this year. https://techcrunch.com/2017/11/10/ibm-passes-major-milestone-with-20-and-50-qubit-quantum-computers-as-a-service/ https://techcrunch.com/2017/11/10/ibm-passes-major-milestone...
- tnash 9y agoAt what point do we no longer trust public key cryptography (RSA)? Where's the break point?
- Drakim 9y agoIt's interesting to imagine what connected planet with no reliable encryption would be like. Although I guess we can always fall back on one-time pads.
- darawk 9y agoQuantum computers don't break all encryption. There's no risk of that, fortunately.
- jayess 9y agoPlease expand on that. What encryption is vulnerable and what isn't?
- mickronome 9y agoI don't know a lot about it, only just enough to know what search term to look for, and Wikipedia had an article that probably fits the bill: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-quantum_cryptography https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-quantum_cryptography
- jwilk 9y agoNon-mobile link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-quantum_cryptography https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-quantum_cryptography
- Zaak 9y agoSymmetric encryption will need to double key lengths, such as using 256-bit AES keys instead of 128-bit. All currently popular forms of asymmetric / public key encryption (including RSA and ECC) are vulnerable to quantum attack.
- darawk 9y agoThe article appears to be saying that they are offering an actual quantum computer as a service, but as I recall, their previous offering was a simulation of a quantum computing environment. Yet, this same article refers to that thing as if it were a real QC. This makes me skeptical that the thing being offered here is a real quantum computer...Anyone here have any insight into whether this is legitimate?
- jameshclark 9y agoThe last news from IBM on HN about their quantum offering was that they had optimised the memory required for simulating quantum computers. 50-qubits seemed to the the upper limit before, but they managed to simulate a 56-qubit circuit. It was a good read: https://arxiv.org/abs/1710.05867 https://arxiv.org/abs/1710.05867 They've had real hardware for a while, though, and they have 5-qubit and 16-qubit machines that anyone can try via IBM Q experience. So this is 100% legit as far as I'm concerned.
- GreenOceanBlue 9y agoThere is no such thing as a quantum computer in 2017. It is fantasy.
- derwiki 9y agoNothing specific to whether this claim is legitimate, but lately IBM has a tendency to make bold claims about tech that can't be backed up (e.g. Watson).
- ethbro 9y agoLet's be charitable: IBM marketing has that tendency. IBM does still do some amazing research.
- andrewflnr 9y agoNot an expert, but I do find some of the phrasing weird. Early on they talk about improvements to connectivity and packaging, which would seem to only be relevant to real, live, physical quantum computers. There's also the professor talking about having students run programs on real quantum computers, without any qualifiers (that were included here, anyway) about how it's actually a simulation. Later it talks about software tools, including a Jupyter notebook for heaven's sake, without mentioning the vast gulf between that and what they seem to claim at the top of the article. I'm tempted to say that the author of this press release simply doesn't understand the difference.
- thibran 9y agoDoes the appearance of quantum computers mean that the effectiveness of programming languages becomes secondary and that ease-of-use/expressiveness will be the most valued trait?
- Zaak 9y agoNo. Quantum computers are very specialized devices. They allow massive speedups for certain applications, and no benefit at all for general-purpose computing. I expect to see a flourishing of quantum programming languages with which to write code for quantum computers, but that's a different subject.
- zamalek 9y agoWhat are they doing about error correction? Not that it makes this any less impressive (everything starts somewhere), are they simply ignoring the problem?
- vtomole 9y agoIt's a bit too early for quantum computers to do fault-tolerant (error corrected) computation. This is because you need more than one physical qubit to make a logical (error corrected) qubit. You need 7 physical qubits to encode a logical qubit if you use the Steane code [0]. So with 50 qubits, they could theoretically make 7 error corrected qubits. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steane_code https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steane_code
- greeneggs 9y agoIn fact, the smallest quantum error-correcting code using qubits uses only five qubits. [1] So you could fit 10 of these codewords into 50 qubits. But that's not right. At least two more qubits are needed for fault-tolerant error correction. So that means you could fit nine codewords into 50 qubits (since 9x5+2=47 < 50). But that's not right. There exist more efficient codes that put multiple encoded qubits into a single code block. [2] For example, three qubits can be encoded into eight, still with distance three. [3] Six of these could fit into 50 qubits (since 6x8+2=50), giving 18 encoded qubits. But that's not right. The IBM systems are superconducting qubits, with very constrained interactions. Not every qubit can talk directly to every other qubit. So you'd probably want every code block to have its own extra qubits dedicated to error correction. If you need 8+2 qubits per code block, then you could fit five code blocks, for 15 encoded qubits, into 50. Obviously this is really complicated. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stabilizer_code#Example_of_a_stabilizer_code https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stabilizer_code#Example_of_a_s... [2] http://www.codetables.de/TableIII.php http://www.codetables.de/TableIII.php [3] http://www.codetables.de/QECC.php?q=4&n=8&k=3 http://www.codetables.de/QECC.php?q=4&n=8&k=3
- jackfoxy 9y agoI recently had a conversation with a Microsoft quantum researcher, and this a close approximation to his answer. I just wanted a number. It's complicated.
- erikj 9y agoIs this a true quantum computer? The controversy around D-Wave was confusing.
- wmnwmn 9y agoThey're definitely referring to a real ("universal") quantum computer, not the quantum annealing devices of D-wave. Their computer will be able to run the Schor algorithm, if it is as advertised. If they have 20 qubits in two months, as they say they will, that seems like great progress compared to where I thought the field was. And if they have 50 within a couple years after that, it would be huge. One caveat is they seem to be making a distinction between a "universal" quantum computer, and a "universal fault-tolerant" one. Fault-tolerance requires a lot more qubits so it's not clear to me how valuable even 50 will be, if not error-corrected. I must say I will be kind of amazed if quantum computers prove to be scalable the way classical ones have been. I'm inclined to believe that the "Church-Turing" thesis will ultimately prevail once the cost of construction of the machines is factored in (~linear growth for the classical machines, greater than polynomial for the quantum). But I've been wrong before.
- andrewla 9y agoYou say "If they have 20 qubits in two months" and "if they have 50 within a couple of years". Doesn't the article say that they have 50? I'm unclear on this, because I have yet to see a published result talking about running Shor's algorithm on a quantum computer beyond the NMR-based physical simulation and the adiabatic one (which is just annealing). What exactly is IBM claiming to have done here?
- powertower 9y agoI've been following quantum computing since D-Wave made its press release some years back. Now I'm a complete skeptic. The huge red flag I can't get over is if it is as so, why can no one validate it after all this time? Why is there the proverbial "it works but not in the way you think it works" (i.e., quantum annealing) or "it works but we can use non-QM systems to simulate it faster, better, cheaper by a factor of a trillion"? If QM computing was truly feasible (assuming that QM does have an underlining phenomena that is physically real), why are the results after all this time so fuzzy?
- Certhas 9y agoBecause you have to build the quantum computer in a world that is overwhelmingly classical. There are no qualifiers along the lines of "underlying phenomena". It's simply difficult to get a stable enough interface between the classical and the quantum, so you can control it, while at the same time isolating it enough that it doesn't decohere to classicality. Who knows, maybe reliable scalable quantum computation truly isn't feasible for some reason, but if you study the physics, the fact that this is so hard is not really a surprise.
- powertower 9y agoBut they have already solved the engineering problems (at least 10 years ago). They already have "qbits". The interface issues look to be 98% solved. And the temperature cooling, the EM shielding, and everything else (that is outside the circuitry design and the physical chipset), a person with a budget of 80,000 USD can recreated in his garage. Its the results I can't understand. Why can't X qbits, in the time they stay coherent, produce results that agree with the mathematical analysis of the setup? Why is it always off by a factor so large that its not even productive for any task. My understanding of it is not complete, this is why I ask. Is the interface issue only 2% solved (and not 98%), etc.?
- Xeoncross 9y agoQuantum computing reminds me of time travel for all the same reasons. This is not a quick win. How would you even validate you built a quantum computer?
- comicjk 9y agoQuantum computers can be simulated classically, in a timeframe exponentially related to the number of qubits. So as long as the quantum computer is not too big you can compare the results to an exact classical simulation and see if it works. The current record for classical simulation is 56 qubits (https://arxiv.org/abs/1710.05867 https://arxiv.org/abs/1710.05867). This is an active area of research, since we want to be able to check the early-generation quantum computers carefully.
- nradov 9y agoIf you run something like Shor's algorithm you can validate it using a stopwatch and pocket calculator.
- quickthrower2 9y agoHow do you validate you built a classical computer?
- JepZ 9y agoPresenting the pictures of a quantum computer with adbobe flash is an impressive combination of technologies. I hope they are use a different technology stack to develop the OS of that machine ;-)
- StephenMelon 9y agoWell making Flash work on mobile is one potential use for quantum computing I guess? :D
- exikyut 9y agoLooks like their publishing platform is that old that it's still using Flickr's Flash photo embedding widget. TIL Flickr had such a widget.
- roywiggins 9y agoFlickr's first incarnation was as a Flex app, if I remember right. The whole thing was Flash.
- IIAOPSW 9y agoTalking about the websites stack instead of the content is the HN equivalent of bike-shedding. It sounds like a contribution but it isn't. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/bikeshedding https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/bikeshedding
- mwilliaams 9y agoJeez man let him make a joke
- ihaveahadron 9y agocomputer hardware, seems, especially compared to like the eighties to the nineties, stagnant. we won't see much in hardware to care about until a computer hardware revolution ie. quantum processors this is a "super summary" of obvious shit that is WAY too little understood by, fucking anyone
- petrikapu 9y agoDo you think this can fk up RSA and render our industry obsolete?
- submeta 9y agoThe paper in the thread below claims that in ten years it might be the case: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15674970 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15674970
- nategri 9y agoQuantum computer news! Everyone is excited and confused.
- jest7325 9y agoHow many qubit does it take to crack an AES 192 key?
- rootw0rm 9y agoA lot, considering you'd need 2^96 quantum operations.
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- posixplz 9y agoMost postulations I've seen follow the axiom that the number of qubits must be no less than twice the number of bits used to generate the key. I found a pretty good summary of that thinking on StackExchange: https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/87345/how-many-qubits-are-needed-to-factor-2048-bit-rsa-keys-on-a-quantum-computer https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/87345/how-many-...
- jcranmer 9y agoFor AES, the quantum advantage is merely grover's algorithm, which allows you to invert a function in O(sqrt(N)) time instead of O(N) time. Basically, the algorithm would look like "compute AES-192 on a uniform random quantum state, then do Grover's algorithm for 2^96 timesteps." This needs as many qubits as it takes to compute AES-192 (which, since the algorithm isn't unitary, is strictly greater than 192 qubits). More important is the fact that it's a very long-running application: it requires to you keep over 192 qubits coherent for a very long time, which is probably an order of magnitude or more in error correction requirements.
- eric-hu 9y agoIf quantum computing improves as it had been, how does this affect Bitcoin and ethereum as we now know it? Could the blockchain be compromised by a malicious actor who has much less than the majority?
- bdamm 9y agoMy prediction: at some point Bitcoin will go through an upgrade process to transfer user wallets to a key pair based on a quantum resistant public key algorithm. Users will be given a time frame to transmit their coins to the new wallets, and after that time is expired, EC-based wallets will not be considered valid transaction sources any longer. Classic cash conversion in the digital age.
- quickthrower2 9y agoThat would be a fork, which is interesting. The recent BTC fork shows that this can be politically successful so there is hope.
- IIAOPSW 9y agoI wrote an article about this pending publication so I can't link you just yet. Bitcoin is mostly safe. Transactions in the pending pool can be compromised but quantum computers would need to perform logical operations at around 660 MHz. Confirmed transactions and unspent transactions are completely safe. The earliest quantum computers won't be fast enough to perform this attack. The problem is easily remedied by hard forking to replace ECDSA with a different public key system. There will be a lot of advanced warning. I'm not sure on Ether.
- jpalomaki 9y agoAre there some practical use cases for 50 qubit processor or is more off a research thing?