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IBM unveils 127-qubit quantum processor

• gigel82 5y ago
  No they didn't; there is no such thing as a quantum computer or a quantum processor outside of theoretical papers. I know I'll be downvoted by saying that (like I was last time) but that doesn't change facts; they have a random number generator that is capable of generating a lot of very random numbers... cool, cool, cool.
  • dougSF70 5y ago
    I am all in for down votes. I am not a physicist but the cost of cooling must astronomical for the output you get. CF. When autonomous vehicle technology gets released into production it is likely they won't make your car look like its wearing a dunce's hat whereas when quantum computers enter production we will still need mK temperatures for them to operate. The cost of cooling will burn the planet up further, just so someone can crack a SHA-256 encrypted password in seconds...random numbers indeed.
    • krastanov 5y ago
      There are technologies that would not need the 15mK operating temperatures, they are just in their infancy. The most interesting applications of quantum computing have little to do with encryption or breaking codes. Chemistry and optimization problems are much more exciting. SHA-256 is a hash, not an encryption algorithm. And quantum computers have nothing to contribute to reversing hashes or breaking symmetric encryption.
      • dougSF70 5y ago
        While I don't doubt that advances are being made, this has the hallmarks of cold fusion all over again. By the time it is in production, DeepMind will have made significant head way using conventional CPU/GPU.
  • bnjemian 5y ago
    If you added one word of qualification – practical quantum computer or quantum processor – this would actually be a reasonable position to argue.
    • gigel82 5y ago
      No, I mean in the real sense, there is no actual quantum processor anywhere in the world (unless some secret organization actually built something amazing and is hiding it). Not a single quantum logical gate exists that actually behaves as described in the theory, let alone circuits of quantum gates that do even the most basic of computation. Actually, I'll take that one step further and say that no one has produced a single qubit (actual logical qubit as described in the theoretical literature), these 127 (if that) are what they call "physical qubits" or what you and me would call chaotic sources of uncontrolled entropy (i.e. random number generators). I'm not saying quantum computing in the physical world is impossible, I'm just saying no one has accomplished it (yet).
      • krastanov 5y ago
        Like the parent comment, your absolutism seems unreasonable. A wave-plate is a darn-near-perfect single qubit gate for a dual-rail encoded photonic qubit. It is just that we can not really generate photons on demand in a scalable way. Hence agreeing both with "there are some small noisy unreliable quantum computers" and with "there are no scalable useful practical quantum computers".
      • bnjemian 5y ago
        Uncontrolled entropy? If you can repeatedly throw a ball and hit a target but not the bullseye, that doesn't mean you have no control, it just means you need to practice more. In the spirit of that, there are recent experimental demonstrations of logical qubits: - NV in diamond qubits (https://arxiv.org/abs/2108.01646 https://arxiv.org/abs/2108.01646) - Superconducting qubits (https://journals.aps.org/prxquantum/pdf/10.1103/PRXQuantum.2.010339 https://journals.aps.org/prxquantum/pdf/10.1103/PRXQuantum.2...) True, a universal logical gate set has yet to be practically realized (at least to my knowledge). But, it seems you're looking for perfection and QC will never be that – even with error correction. Fundamentally, QCs are analog and probabilistic; all discrete states we define theoretically will be approximations in practice if and when they can be demonstrated. But if the approximation is exponentially close to the target state and that is sufficient for the practical purpose at hand...does it matter?
• quijoteuniv 5y ago
  Can’t wait to install Windows on this!
  • da_chicken 5y ago
    I prefer the old standby responses: > Just imagine a Beowulf cluster of these Or: > But can it run Crysis?
  • mindcrime 5y ago
    This is IBM, it will only run OS/2.
• rbanffy 5y ago
  IBM has been making the coolest-looking (and coolest) computers... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a0glxDw700g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a0glxDw700g
  • ag8 5y ago
    It's crazy that a lot of the freezers they use, that can get temperatures down to a few millikelvin, are commodities at this point. You could go and buy one if you wanted to for $50k!
• kranke155 5y ago
  Amazing!
• dvh 5y ago
  Will this system be finally able to factor number 35 using Shor? IBM tried and failed in 2019
  • davidgerard 5y ago
    came here to post "call me when you can factor 25"
  • davidgerard 5y ago
    For those interested, here's the paper where the IBM Quantum Computer failed to factor 35: https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevA.100.012305 https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevA.100.012305 I found a cite to it claiming this was evidence of success in factoring 35, 'cos they didn't read past the abstract (which could be read as indicating success) to the words in the paper "Eventually, the algorithm fails to factor N = 35." But yeah, "call me when it factors 35."
• rwmj 5y ago
  Interesting that the number of qubits is approximately doubling every year according to the article.
  • dr_dshiv 5y ago
    Yeah, and with the QuEra MIT startup announcing a 256 qubit computer today — just a day after IBM — the rate of exponential change might be even higher. We could get to a million Qubits by mid December! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29259549 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29259549
  • sgt101 5y ago
    well Google Sycamore (53 qubits) arrived in 2019, and it's 2021 now - so 2 years (being generous).
  • zoover2020 5y ago
    How do we call this 'law'?
    • bnjemian 5y ago
      A quanta article (prematurely in my view), tried to dub this Neven's law: https://www.quantamagazine.org/does-nevens-law-describe-quantum-computings-rise-20190618/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/does-nevens-law-describe-quan...
    • DeathArrow 5y ago
      Moore's law?
    • thehappypm 5y ago
      Schrodinger’s shrinking cat
    • YossarianFrPrez 5y ago
      Perhaps: Moore's Second Law
    • abrichr 5y ago
• osipov 5y ago
  surprisingly not a word about quantum supremacy
  • Koshkin 5y ago
    > It heralds the point in hardware development where quantum circuits cannot be reliably simulated exactly on a classical computer.
    • cgearhart 5y ago
      I mean, that was practically already the case with the Google Sycamore processor. IBM claimed that they could simulate the 53-qubit circuit in something like 24 hours on a supercomputer (with a bunch of bespoke optimizations), but a 54-qubit version would have been completely classically intractable. We didn’t need to get to 100+ qubits, and those came out before now.
      • intvocoder 5y ago
        Google's claim was widely criticized for being an unimportant and uninteresting benchmark, making the quantum s*premacy claim nonsense. Later research proposes that an exascale-level supercomputer could simulate it in "dozens of seconds". https://arxiv.org/abs/2111.03011 https://arxiv.org/abs/2111.03011
        • krastanov 5y ago
          This is a funny comparison. "Here is this device with 50 components. It can be simulated by a device with 1000000000000 components, so we should not really be impressed."
          • bnjemian 5y ago
            Truth. Not to mention the stunning asymmetry in energy usage. At a minimum, if we can solve an equivalent computational problem using a quantum computer with orders of magnitude less energy than a classical HPC, QC merits consideration. The carbon footprint of data centers is far from negligible. Computational advantages aren't the only types advantages we should care about.
• baq 5y ago
  > IBM Quantum System Two is designed to work with IBM's future 433-qubit and 1,121 qubit processors. what's the smallest useful (as in, 'non-toy', or maybe 'worth buying time on') quantum computer?
  • xxpor 5y ago
    Why 433 and 1121? In classical computers, everyone knows why a lot of things are done in powers of 2. Is there a different base number useful for quantum computation that I don't know about (for example, is this an integer multiple of a specific sin/cos value)?
    • krastanov 5y ago
      Not really. For this particular device they are laying out the physical qubits in some geometric lattice constrained by where they can put traces for microwave inductors and capacitors, and it just happens that this is the convenient size at which to try to build the lattice.
  • snarkypixel 5y ago
    A real random number generator, this is basically the "hello world" on a quantum computer.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • krastanov 5y ago
    If you are a researcher from another field that just wants to contract out the computation of a numerical solution to some chemistry problem infeasible on a classical supercomputer, a million "physical" qubits is a fairly reasonable guestimate. If you are a quantum computation person developing near term applications, you probably would already start getting excited with a 100 (sufficiently long-lived) qubits. The "sufficiently long-lived" is the problematic part. Every lab has its own bespoke figure of merit (quantum volume, CLOPS, fidelities, etc). It is basically impossible to compare devices without being a researcher in the field for now. But at some point a novel drug or material will be developed thanks to a quantum computer and then we should really get excited about renting time on these devices.
• krastanov 5y ago
  Any idea where one can find qubit lifetimes and gate fidelities? The classical RF engineering behind controlling that many qubits is certainly great, but it is hard to get excited about the "quantumness" without these figures of merit.
  • _8091149529 5y ago
    You can create a free account at IBM Quantum and peek at the latest calibration data there. Edit: Only a fraction of the qubits of the 127 qubit system were calibrated when I looked.
• adrian_mrd 5y ago
  As someone who knows little about quantum computing, what is the significance of 127-qubits? (as opposed to classical computing's 128 bits, as a reference)
  • klyrs 5y ago
    Thus far, only D-Wave has truly scalable control over their qubits. They accomplished that by moving to an entirely different computational regime. Until gate-model efforts find a solution to scalable control, every "we built a bigger chip" announcement is a milestone in microwave engineering.
  • krastanov 5y ago
    Nothing. It is just how many they were able to manufacture and control reliably. Probably were aiming for some power-of-two number but had a couple of defects.
  • space_fountain 5y ago
    As someone who is very much a lay person, my understanding is the qubitsness of a quantum computer is closer to the ram capacity of a classical computer than anything
  • tcgv 5y ago
    Computational power for quantum computers goes as 2^n, where n is the number of qubits, so unlike classical computing this machine should be orders of magnitude superior to Google's 53-quibit Sycamore. If you wanna learn more about the subject, a couple of years back I wrote a introduction to quantum computing for programmers which you may find useful: - https://thomasvilhena.com/2019/11/quantum-computing-for-programmers https://thomasvilhena.com/2019/11/quantum-computing-for-prog...
    • 7373737373 5y ago
      What does "computational power" mean though? Which specific problem can these systems solve that classical computers cannot, or more effectively?
• davidw 5y ago
  Very press-releasey, which I guess is fair given that it is, indeed, a press release. I'd love to hear more context from people knowledgeable in the field.
• baby 5y ago
  I'm starting to get some fatigue about quantum computer news, and I just dismiss them now. If there really is a valuable breakthrough, everyone will be talking about it for months non-stop so I won't miss it.
  • dekhn 5y ago
    This is exactly correct. The moment something important happens in quantum computing the community will recognize it as such. In the meantime most of us are just waiting for somebody to do something interesting that couldn't really have been solved (possibly approximately) on classical systems.
    • cpuguy83 5y ago
      In that sense, this is a pretty big step because for the first time there is a quantum computer that cannot be simulated by a classical one. It's also expected they will have a processor with over 400qubits next year and over 1000 in 2 years. This are huge leaps. Still they aren't currently doing anything useful and need to prove themselves.
      • skohan 5y ago
        What are the innovations allowing for these large leaps? It seems like forever that progress was extremely slow.
        • cpuguy83 5y ago
          Note: I'm a total laymen and have a single source of information, which I read just before seeing the article on hacker news: https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/11/ibm-clears-the-100-qubit-mark-with-its-new-processor/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/11/ibm-clears-the-100-q... The Ars article goes into a little more technical detail (a little) than the press announcement.
      • eof 5y ago
        I am surprised to see that growth given my intuition that each additional qubit would be harder than the previous to add to the system. Are there any moores law type predictions/historical trackers for qubits?
• filereaper 5y ago
  >'Eagle' is IBM's first quantum processor developed and deployed to contain more than 100 operational and connected qubits. It follows IBM's 65-qubit 'Hummingbird' processor unveiled in 2020 and the 27-qubit 'Falcon' processor unveiled in 2019. I guess I missed last years announcement of the 65 qubit one. So okay we have a 127 qubit machine, what did they do with it afterwards? The Q3 financials were released so this article can't have been released to pump up the stock price.
  • krastanov 5y ago
    In the months after such an announcement you can expect articles with various attempts at an application to pop up on arxiv. I am saying "attempts at an application", not because the papers are not impressive, rather because the devices are still too small and noisy to excite anyone but researchers in the field. As a researcher in the field I am certainly very excited, because the figure of merit I care about have been drastically improved and this reinforced my belief that we will have a device solving classically-infeasible chemistry simulations soon (anything between 5 and 15 year ;)
    • maaaaattttt 5y ago
      Would you have examples of such simulations at hand? Or links describing some of them? I know next to nothing about quantum computing but I’ve always loved a good infeasible problem.
      • krastanov 5y ago
        Feynman's 1981 "Simulating Physics with Computers" is one of the first mentions of how it is (naively) exponentially expensive to store on a classical computer the quantum state of something with n degrees of freedom (a molecule made of multiple atoms). He suggests (vaguely) the notion of a quantum computer. https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=simulating%20physics%20with%20computers%20feynman https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=simulating%20physics%2... It is less known that a Russian scientist made similar remarks at the same time. This "Science" news blurb pops up on google as an intro as well https://www.science.org/content/article/quantum-computer-simulates-largest-molecule-yet-sparking-hope-future-drug-discoveries https://www.science.org/content/article/quantum-computer-sim... . Although it makes you laugh when you notice that the principle was suggested in 1981, formalized in the mid 90s, initial experimental successes in late 00s, and today we are barely simulating 3 atom molecules. In our defense, it was a 100 years between Babbage, passing through Turing, and getting to something like ENIAC. And a few more decades before the PC.
• mattwilsonn888 5y ago
  Where does this sit on the "applicably breaking secure classical cryptography" spectrum?
  • krastanov 5y ago
    Many years away. A good guestimate is that you need 1M physical qubits factor numbers fast. Also, there is classical public-key cryptography (i.e. encryption algorithms that run efficiently on today's classical computers) that is not susceptible to quantum computers. And symmetric cryptography has never been susceptible to quantum computers.
    • saalweachter 5y ago
      So if we draw an exponential curve from 53 to 127 qubits, we're looking at 13 doublings or about 2 decades? Neat!
  • cgearhart 5y ago
    It’s completely irrelevant to that problem. Breaking crypto requires quantum error correction, which we think requires thousands (perhaps hundreds of thousands) of physical qubits per logical qubit. And the operations of the computation require many more logical qubits than just representing the target value. It’s still gonna be awhile. But this is still pretty interesting because a lot of the detractors of quantum computing thought there was strong evidence that we’d never even manage to get this far. So it seems _slightly_ more likely that large scale abstract quantum computation is feasible.
  • StLCylone 5y ago
    There are probably entities saving encrypted data right now for when that day arrives. Brings up many interesting lines of thought beyond "is it breakable right now?"
    • krastanov 5y ago
      Does it really though? Every secure system design pretty much assumes that the cryptographic standard will be broken in a few decades. Is there really any secret today that would be problematic if made public 30 years in the future? And that would not have been made public by some other method anyway?
• one_off_comment 5y ago
  Aw, they couldn't stuff one more in there to get a power of two? (I know it doesn't really matter for qubits, but still.)
• Panoramix 5y ago
  So what kind of qubits is IBM going for? transmons?
• jazzyjackson 5y ago
  Quantum Computers sitting in their cryogenic chambers are such works of art, stacks of giant brass plates and hundreds of heat pipes (or coolant pipes? liquid helium I suppose) twisted and coiling throughout the structure hanging like some steampunk chandelier (why do they hang from above anyway?) EDIT: changed to a few direct links to pics: [0][1][2] The esoteric design reminds me of the Connection Machine blog posted the other day, "to communicate to people that this was the first of a new generation of computers, unlike any machine they had seen before." [3] I'm curious what they do with these prototypes once they are obsoleted in a matter of months, are the parts so expensive they tear it down to reuse them? Or will the machines be able to go on tour and stand in glass cases to intrigue the next generation of engineers? I know it had a tremendous effect on me to stand in front of a hand-wired lisp machine at the MIT museum. [0] https://img-s-msn-com.akamaized.net/tenant/amp/entityid/AANsFUz.img https://img-s-msn-com.akamaized.net/tenant/amp/entityid/AANs... [1] https://img-s-msn-com.akamaized.net/tenant/amp/entityid/AANsBTo.img https://img-s-msn-com.akamaized.net/tenant/amp/entityid/AANs... [2] https://static.reuters.com/resources/r/?m=02&d=20191023&t=2&i=1444205374&r=LYNXMPEF9M1AZ&w=1600 https://static.reuters.com/resources/r/?m=02&d=20191023&t=2&... [3] https://tamikothiel.com/theory/cm_txts/ https://tamikothiel.com/theory/cm_txts/
  • krastanov 5y ago
    The pipes you mentioned are microwave conduits (for various control signals).
    • jjoonathan 5y ago
      0.141" semi-rigid coax, diameter of champions.
      • rbanffy 5y ago
        > 0.141" semi-rigid coax, diameter of champions. I wonder if we measure it more precisely we'll get to something closer to 1.4142135623730950488...
        • 5y ago
• jes 5y ago
  For me, the name 'Eagle' reminds me of the book "Soul of a New Machine" by Tracy Kidder. That book is about the design and bring-up of another new (at the time) computer system, the Data General MV/8000, which was also code-named Eagle. I wish IBM great success with their work. edit: Clarified that the MV/8000 project was also code-named Eagle.
  • fennecfoxen 5y ago
    Anyone who wants to evoke the pioneering spirit of the moon landing™ uses the name. I worked on a project codenamed "Eagle" just earlier this year.
  • NegativeLatency 5y ago
    Haven’t read that yet but I read “House” by him recently and it was quite good
    • ghaff 5y ago
      House is his other book that clicked with me given I had bought a fixer-upper at the time I read it. I really liked both books but none of the topics of his other books really clicked with me.
    • jes 5y ago
      I enjoyed both Soul of a New Machine and House. A scene from the former that I remember. The principle architect of the machine (Tom West) is talking with Edson DeCastro (CEO of Data General) and is asking for a new oscilloscope to help with the bring-up of the machine. DeCastro tells West, essentially, he's not authorizing a new, expensive scope. West, flabbergasted, asks why. DeCastro lowers his head, peering over the top of his glasses at West, and says "Because scopes cost money, and engineering overtime is free." I'm telling this from memory and some of the details are wrong. I guess I should go get a Kindle copy of the book and re-read it. :-)
      • tasty_freeze 5y ago
        I read the book when it was new. Just a handful of years later I graduated college and got a job at a start up. One of the guys who interviewed me and ended up in the office directly across from my cubicle was Carl Alsing. A few months later someone mentioned that Carl was in "Soul of a New Machine" (Carl was the seasoned hand who was in charge of the "microkids", the green engineers responsible for writing the microcode). I re-read the book. When Kidder first introduces Alsing he sums him up in a few sentences, and damn if he wasn't spot on. Later in the book is an entire chapter about Carl and his unorthodox work habits, and again, it all was so on the mark with what I had learned of Carl firsthand that it gave the rest of the book a great deal of credibility.
• Scene_Cast2 5y ago
  Reminds me of computing history with vacuum tube computers the size of a room. Even if the actual hardware isn't practical today, the lessons learned will still apply in the future.
  • mathgenius 5y ago
    Yeah I agree. There's so many details to work out about controlling these things that this is still significant progress. It's like we need an Elon Musk of quantum to tell us what's going on. We are making these just to blow them up, they aren't going to the moon.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• rain1 5y ago
  It is incredibly dishonest of them to post this without any details about the noise parameters of the system. When reading "127-qubit system" you would expect that you can perform arbitrary quantum computations on these 127 qubits and they would reasonably cohere for at least a few quantum gates. In reality the noise levels are so strong that you can essentially do nothing with them except get random noise results. Maybe averaging the same computation 10 million times will just give you enough proof that they were actually coherent and did a quantum computation. The omission of proper technical details is essentially the same as lying.
  • scrubs 5y ago
    I hope US esp. but also our EU scientist friends eat everybody else's lunch. Better tech. Better science. Better math. Better algos. And, yes, let's get those details right too. Noise management is a key discriminator between POC and practical.
  • amelius 5y ago
    I guess they should show that they have achieved quantum advantage: The Chinese did show it some time ago: https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202110/1237312.shtml https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202110/1237312.shtml
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • krylon 5y ago
    > The omission of proper technical details is essentially the same as lying. Welcome, child, to the beautiful/"special" world of marketing!
    • nixpulvis 5y ago
      Be gone fetus, for there has always been honest marketing. It's just harder to find, sadly.
      • lazide 5y ago
• bastardoperator 5y ago
  Can it run doom though?
  • AnthonyMouse 5y ago
    For the first time ever, the answer appears to be no. A truly unprecedented machine.
  • _trampeltier 5y ago
    Can you flip qbits with rowhammer?
• RivieraKid 5y ago
  Tangential question, what are the areas of technology where we can expect to see substantial progress or breakthroughs within 2030, i.e. what are the most exciting areas to follow and look forward to? Here's my list: - Nuclear fusion (Helion, ZAP, TAE, Tokamak Energy, CFS, Wendelstein). - Self-driving cars. - New types of nuclear fission reactors. - Spaceflight (SpaceX Starship). - Supersonic airplanes (Boom). - Solid state batteries. - Quantum computing. - CPUs and GPUs on sub-5nm nodes. - CRISPR-based therapies. - Longevity research.
  • TheMagicHorsey 5y ago
    Delivery drones: Wing, Amazon, Zipline, Volansi, etc. Synthetic fuels.
  • gfodor 5y ago
    - Psychadelics - VR/AR (photonic override, more specifically) - Fundamental physics (unlocked by tech)
    • tlrobinson 5y ago
      Can you elaborate on “photonic override”? Googling that phrase pretty much just returns more HN comments and tweets by you :)
      • gfodor 5y ago
        A hardware/software proxy that governs all photons you see.
        • walleeee 5y ago
          This is desirable?
          • throwaway6977 5y ago
            Certainly for someone with defective default hardware ;)
• xondono 5y ago
  I can avoid thinking that as a species, QC is a bad investment. I think we’re trying just too early, like Charles Babbage. Great idea but the world doesn’t have the tech required. I think that if they are honest with themselves, most researchers know they won’t see the day QC are a practical reality, but everyone is trying to become the “father of QC”.
  • snarkypixel 5y ago
    > The best way to predict the future is to create it
    • xondono 5y ago
      Yeah, but trying to build things too early makes them meaningless. Babbage designed a computer that had essentially no impact, because it could not be built, and by the time the tech was around we had better ways to build computers. As a global effort, it may be wiser to shift focus to other things more achievable, and try QC again in 2100 (IDK, just some random future time).
      • leadingthenet 5y ago
        Isn't the problem, though, that you don't really know what is, and isn't, achievable until you actually get there and have the benefit of hindsight?
      • samus 5y ago
        Babbage's technology was feasible in principle. The differential engine was successfully built as a museum project, though it was complicated by Babbage not leaving behind detailed plans[0]. It can be argued that gear-based computational engines face inherent technical challenges that electrical designs don't. But simpler, far more successful versions of mechanical calculators have been developed as well[1]. There is a far greater resolve to invest in Quantum Computing technology compared to Babbage's technology in the 19th century. It remains to be seen whether ultimately something useful emerges. But we might discover other things along the way, just as the Manhattan project and the Race to the Moon were the pathway to develop several other useful technologies. [0]: https://www.computerhistory.org/babbage/modernsequel/ https://www.computerhistory.org/babbage/modernsequel/ [1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curta https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curta
• relaunched 5y ago
  Qubits? Wanna impress me? Tell me about the great strides you've made in fault tolerance.
• haltingproblem 5y ago
  Obligatory PSA: Scott Locklin's "Quantum computing as a field is obvious bullshit": "When I say Quantum Computing is a bullshit field, I don’t mean everything in the field is bullshit, though to first order, this appears to be approximately true. I don’t have a mathematical proof that Quantum Computing isn’t at least theoretically possible. I also do not have a mathematical proof that we can or can’t make the artificial bacteria of K. Eric Drexler’s nanotech fantasies. Yet, I know both fields are bullshit. Both fields involve forming new kinds of matter that we haven’t the slightest idea how to construct. Neither field has a sane ‘first step’ to make their large claims true. ..... “quantum computing” enthusiasts expect you to overlook the fact that they haven’t a clue as to how to build and manipulate quantum coherent forms of matter necessary to achieve quantum computation. A quantum computer capable of truly factoring the number 21 is missing in action. In fact, the factoring of the number 15 into 3 and 5 is a bit of a parlour trick, as they design the experiment while knowing the answer, thus leaving out the gates required if we didn’t know how to factor 15. The actual number of gates needed to factor a n-bit number is 72 x n^3; so for 15, it’s 4 bits, 4608 gates; not happening any time soon". [1]: https://scottlocklin.wordpress.com/2019/01/15/quantum-computing-as-a-field-is-obvious-bullshit/ https://scottlocklin.wordpress.com/2019/01/15/quantum-comput...
• czbond 5y ago
  I like how their emails are on the article like "hey, I'm a quant C.S. that works at IBM. Hire me somewhere great!"
• Thaxll 5y ago
  IBM is dead change my mind.
• VWWHFSfQ 5y ago
  This is fascinating to me! Quantum computing is such an incredible frontier. But I suppose it will mostly be used to decrypt all the currently un-decryptable internet traffic being archived at the Utah Data Center [1]. But, maybe it will also be used for something good for humanity, too. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Data_Center https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Data_Center
  • krastanov 5y ago
    The cryptography uses are fairly boring in my opinion. We already have classical cryptography techniques which are not susceptible to quantum computers. On the other hand, being finally able to fully simulate large molecules with significant quantum effects (not possible even on classical super computers) would be amazing.
  • zikduruqe 5y ago
    I like this talk... and especially around the 10 minute mark. https://www.ted.com/talks/craig_costello_in_the_war_for_information_will_quantum_computers_defeat_cryptographers https://www.ted.com/talks/craig_costello_in_the_war_for_info...
• Decabytes 5y ago
  I wonder how fast quantum computers are progressing. Like are we seeing similar increases in performance that we saw with silicon computers back in the 60s->Now? Or is it slower due to the intense cooling we need to give them?
• exdsq 5y ago
  Anyone here writing quantum programs? :)
  • bnjemian 5y ago
    Yes.
    • exdsq 5y ago
      Care to elaborate? :P What are you programming? Which languages? I'm keen to learn more!
      • bnjemian 5y ago
        There are a lot of languages. I use Python. Right now I'm working on a project using the Pennylane library for quantum machine learning. Other languages exist – dedicated ones like Q# or quipper (built on top of Haskell) or libraries in Julia, C++, etc. One paradigm, variational quantum algorithms (part of the broader class of hybrid quantum-classical algorithms), has several similarities to classical deep learning. The approach can be summed up as: 1. Construct a parameterized quantum circuit – one where the quantum gates are controlled by real-valued parameters. Ideally this circuit is one you think could reasonably solve some problem based off of your knowledge of the problem, input data, and behavior of quantum information. 2. Define an objective function. 3. Iteratively adjust the circuit parameters. This is done by measuring the output of the circuit and using that information in conjunction with some optimization function (e.g. stochastic gradient descent). In general terms, I'm working on QML algorithms that may some day be used for applications in biology and medicine. For a serious discussion of the approach, see: https://www.nature.com/articles/s42254-021-00348-9 https://www.nature.com/articles/s42254-021-00348-9 There's also several nice walkthroughs of the basics on Pennylane's website: https://pennylane.ai/qml/demos/tutorial_variational_classifier.html https://pennylane.ai/qml/demos/tutorial_variational_classifi...
• readams 5y ago
  Scott Aaronson had a brief comment on the news on his blog: https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=6111 https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=6111 Seems we're still a bit light on details. I hope to see a lot more on this. The progress on quantum computing lately is exciting though!
• ThinkBeat 5y ago
  For those who know how all this works or how it should work. If it is true that a type of quantum computer might be able factor large number and if it is true that it would allow the users to read lots of encrypted data then quantum computing would be at the very top of the list of every intelligence agency out there in every country. I am thinking high multi billion labs yr/labs. It would be a direct threat / issue / opportunity to national security. I am burying myself in assumptions I cannot begin to justify.) If that is the case, is what we are seeing here from IBM, or Google, state of the art? What are the chances that some (secret) government lab somewhere ( not necessarily in the US) has a much more advanced model already working? Is there any chance that a working crypto breaker could be operational? Of course, if there was such a thing, out there, it would be in the greatest interest of whatever fraction had it to ensure nobody knew about it. Since it would give an enormous advantage to posses and use it, it would be critical to not let anyone know. I came across some declassified docs covering NSA a long long time ago, from what I learned it seemed like they had access to technology that was not commercially available at the time. (Sorry,. I like to write fictional stories on my spare time. I may have dipped into that territory too much in this post.)
  • AnthonyMouse 5y ago
    Intelligence agencies are doing this the other way around. They're recording existing encrypted traffic to decrypt later should a useful quantum computer come into existence. Cryptographers are working on post-quantum cryptography. This is expected to work in practice but they have to make it efficient and it's going to go through a couple of generations of new attack methods being discovered and then thwarted. At this point the level of deployment is basically zero. Notably, pre-shared key systems (i.e. systems that use symmetric cryptography) are not as vulnerable to quantum computers, if you need something that works right now.
  • tw04 5y ago
    I'm quite confident by the press release alone that these systems are still almost entirely useless for breaking crypto BECAUSE of the fact we're hearing about them. If IBM had a chip that could fundamentally break crypto, the US government would almost assuredly immediately embargo any mention of it. Sure a lot of the science behind it would likely be in public journals, but as we approach a point in which it could actually break * crypto, it would become a state secret. I have no doubt the leaders of IBM are well aware of that fact (as well as google, d-wave, the University of Science and Technology of China, etc).
• deleted 5y ago
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• gerdesj 5y ago
  "IBM measures progress in quantum computing hardware through three performance attributes: Scale, Quality and Speed." That's nice. The real world (let alone the quantum one - whatever that means) doesn't. Please Mr IBM: Get your scientists to inform your press releases. At the moment you sound like a bit of a nob with an unfortunate affliction.
  • gerdesj 5y ago
    "As far as I could see, the marketing materials that IBM released yesterday take a lot of words to say absolutely nothing about what, to experts, is the single most important piece of information: namely," As a clever bloke (Aaronson) said: "Get a grip and give us the science (in paper form)". His blog is quite animated.
• BryanBeshore 5y ago
  IBM’s next ad campaign: “IBM is quantum computing. Run your business on quantum computing”
• dr_dshiv 5y ago
  A new MIT startup, QuEra, just announced a 256 quantum computer —- and they used it to make pixel art. https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/11/17/1040243/quantum-computer-256-bit-startup/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/11/17/1040243/quantum-... Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29259549 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29259549