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IBM unveils first quantum computer in Germany
- thiago_fm 5y ago"funded by German taxpayers" As if foreigners living in Germany doesn't pay taxes.
- mistershrubber 5y agoI honestly just read that as "people who pay taxes in Germany"
- disgu 5y agoYes, that's the correct use of the phrase and how exactly how it's being used 100% of the time.
- MandieD 5y agoI’ve referred to myself as a German taxpayer the same way I call myself a permanent resident of Germany, and feel this entitles me to write my local member of the Bundestag - who apparently agrees, responding with a far more direct email addressing the topic than I’ve ever gotten from my US senators or congressman. I am a bit bothered by things that say “BürgerInnen” have the right to something all legal residents have (like the Covid-19 vaccine), for fear that some of the less foreigner-friendly types are tacking on a “Staats-“ prefix in their heads, but that’s on me.
- weinzierl 5y agoIt's the tax that is German, not necessarily the payer. Also when it comes to foreign citizens paying taxes in Germany it is a bit more nuanced. In general German tax law goes to great lengths to avoid double taxation, so no matter who you pay your taxes to you are treated fairly.
- ElViajero 5y ago"Quantum computers like the Q System One are still very much experimental devices. They can’t outperform classical computers at useful tasks (in fact, your laptop is probably more powerful when it comes to real-life computation), but are instead supposed to be research tools; letting us work out, qubit by qubit, how quantum devices might work at all." from https://www.theverge.com/2019/1/8/18171732/ibm-quantum-computer-20-qubit-q-system-one-ces-2019 https://www.theverge.com/2019/1/8/18171732/ibm-quantum-compu...
- miltondts 5y ago"They can’t outperform classical computers at useful tasks" Then calling them quantum computers is a marketing stunt. A quantum computer is something that can factor an integer (or a similarly quantum task) that no classical computer can (in a reasonable amount of time).
- adrianN 5y agoUh no, a quantum computer is a device that can execute quantum algorithms using real qbits. The machines featured in asymptotic analysis don't exist in the real world. It's not like your classical computer has an infinite amount of memory that can be randomly accessed in constant time.
- miltondts 5y agoI'm talking about capability, not theoretical properties. Can any current so called quantum computers actually perform any computations faster than a classical one? To be called a quantum computer, I would expect they should, but last I checked, all claims of quantum supremacy appear to be highly disputed. I mean calling a quantum computer a machine that uses qbits to compute, completely ignores the reason why we are interested in them. You don't see millions of dollars poured into gear computers.
- adrianN 5y agoTheoretical properties of quantum computers are all asymptotic. Asymptotic runtimes don't always correspond to real world performance. The hope is that we will eventually be able to build quantum computers such that the constant factors don't mask asymptotic speedups for problem sizes that we actually want to solve. To figure out how to do that we build research machines.
- rwmj 5y agoWhy would this matter? Let's say a research company invented a three dimensional computer chip. It would still be a breakthrough, even if the initial samples could only run very slowly.
- beforeolives 5y agoWith IBM's materials I genuinely can't tell how much is real working technology and how much is salesmanship and hype. Can anyone with more expertise comment on the current state of quantum computing and whether any of it is exaggerated?
- Beltiras 5y agoIBM is really good at hyping tech and then finding a mark and squeezing real hard. Just look at how they wrung hospitals for exorbitant amounts of money for Watson. If someone bought an IBM solution they should be fired.
- russtrotter 5y agoHa, your comment is ironic since I still remember from back in the 70's/80's that "nobody got fired for buying an IBM". The quote might even be older than that, but I had first heard that quote when Microsoft was still on the rise handing IBM their butts in the fledgling PC marketplace.
- Beltiras 5y agoThat's what I was going for.
- singularity2001 5y agoThe current state of quantum computing is very far from actual applications, since adding more qubits results in higher entropy, incoherence and other disturbing effects. Source: Science 2020
- rwmj 5y agoIBM and Google are about neck-and-neck with state of the art quantum computers (both 53 qubits, each using fundamentally different technology). So yes, this one is real. However it's all research at the moment, there are no practical applications that aren't better solved on a classical computer.
- ucosty 5y agoI can't speak to the technical merits of the machine, but I think IBM did a great job with the industrial design. It looks like some kind of alternate history where super-integrated vacuum tubes won the day.
- nyc 5y agoI was surprised to learn that 99% of the shiny parts in the photo belongs to the dilution refrigerator (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dilution_refrigerator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dilution_refrigerator) needed to get the machine down close to absolute zero. The actual computer is a tiny chip at the bottom of the apparatus!
- dralley 5y agoSurprisingly, modern-era IBM supercomputers and mainframes are some of the "sexiest" machines out there in terms of industrial design. Apparently they put a lot of effort into that https://cdn.wccftech.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/Summit_ORNL-1480x1184.jpg https://cdn.wccftech.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/Summit_O... https://images.idgesg.net/images/article/2017/07/ibm_z_4-100729284-large.jpg https://images.idgesg.net/images/article/2017/07/ibm_z_4-100...
- hulitu 5y agoSo today, like in the past IBM is blessed with German money.
- htk 5y agoIs it just me or these “quantum computers” should be actually called “quantum computer emulators”?
- Milner08 5y agoThey're using actual Q-Bits, so I would say its an actual Quantum computer. That doesn't make it any good though. Nor does it dismiss the claims of marketing hype. This is exactly that.
- me_me_me 5y ago> IBM unveils... Ugh. At this point whenever is see IBM in the headline I know there is a hook in there with PR spin. I think I might stop reading about IBM all together. I don't have time to actually find the truth behind PR smoke and mirrors.
- tut-urut-utut 5y agoGerman government is using this as a PR of "innovation made in Germany" and their successful politics, although it has nothing to do with them.
- resiros 5y agoI am always confused whether the quantum computer are over-hyped like fusion reactors or are in the tipping point of having practical and wide usage. Would love to read a sane analysis of this question..
- rax0m 5y agoTake your confusion about that as your first data point on whether it is over-hyped or not ;) I don't think there is any way to build a quantum computer on earth with a significant amount of qubits (enough to break ECDSA with Shor's algorithm), where you can entangle the qubits as you want. The system would be too sensitive to the slightest vibration.
- chadcmulligan 5y agoYes same, though I read an argument saying there's no theoretical reason we can't build one, so if we try and can't we'll probably discover some new physics.
- tsjq 5y agolike graphene ?
- f6v 5y ago> Martin Jetter, IBM’s chairman for Europe, the Middle East and Africa, said IBM is working towards making a stable quantum computer capable of handling more than 1,000 qubits by 2023. Is 1000 a lot?
- knuthsat 5y agoIf it's not logical qubits then it isn't for practical purposes but I guess it's a qubit record.
- DebtDeflation 5y agoOver 2 years old at this point, but still highly relevant: https://scottlocklin.wordpress.com/2019/01/15/quantum-computing-as-a-field-is-obvious-bullshit/ https://scottlocklin.wordpress.com/2019/01/15/quantum-comput...
- fh973 5y agoIndeed, but it didn't age well in one aspect: "If I were in charge of science funding, the entire world budget for this nonsense would be below that we allocate for the development of Bussard ramjets, which are also not known to be impossible, and are a lot more cool looking". IBM made quite some progress on the industrial design front.
- verytrivial 5y agoHowever IBM is now unable to unveil computer's momentum.
- miguelmurca 5y ago> Regular modern computers process functions in a binary fashion, carrying out tasks that use fragments of data that are only ever a 1 or 0. Quantum computers use subatomic particles to perform calculations at far greater speeds than existing supercomputers, and data can be both a 1 and 0 at the same time. twitch (this is very wrong)
- notRobot 5y agoCan someone please ELI5 a better explanation?
- Aardwolf 5y agoThis recent link posted on hacker news explains it quite well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27439839 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27439839 "What makes quantum computing so hard to explain?"
- kvathupo 5y agoA classical bit is either 0 or 1. A qubit is a complex unit vector, wherein the classical states of 0 and 1 correspond to antipodal points on the unit sphere painted by the range of possible qubits.
- bradleykingz 5y agoHardly an ELI5
- kvathupo 5y agoPerhaps some things (thankfully for our employment prospects) can't be explained to a 5 year old ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ I'd imagine the following Google image [1] is sufficiently understandable to a child: the two dots are bits while the sphere is a qubit. [1] - http://langsrv.astro.cf.ac.uk/research/research_SQDFWM/Blochsphere.PNG http://langsrv.astro.cf.ac.uk/research/research_SQDFWM/Bloch...
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- upofadown 5y agoIs this new computer intended to prove some new approach? Why does it exist? Why didn't they build the 1000 qubit model instead? After all, they claim to know how to do that.