7 ms·

IBM Quantum System Two

101 points by mtillman 4y ago

abrichr 4y ago
Serious question: is there any reason to trust anything IBM does or says isn’t vaporware? In recent memory I am only familiar with failed projects that received copious media praise (eg Watson, BlueMix). The only project I know of that was genuinely successful is Deep Blue. What successes have they had since then?
- rbanffy 4y ago
  There is successful tech in the “tech that does what says on the box” and in “achieves good market fit”. A lot of their stuff does 1, but not 2. And their mainframes, underhyped to the extreme, that more or less still run the world.
  - rosebay 4y ago
    I didn’t know IBM mainframes run the world? Just curious, care to expand?
    - nerdo 4y ago
      Banks run the world, IBM mainframes run the banks.
      - dralley 4y ago
        >IBM mainframes run the banks. And the airlines, and the logistics companies
      - sophacles 4y ago
        That's a bit unfair to the insurance companies. They have a pretty big say in what happens and also run mainframes.
      - hcks 4y ago
        And mainframes run on concrete floors, maybe construction companies run the world by that logic?
        nerdo 4y ago
        Mainframes aren't a big truck, they're a series of concrete floors.
        rbanffy 4y ago
        My usual comparison is with cargo airplanes.
      - Nursie 4y ago
        This is becoming less true over time.
    - dekhn 4y ago
      many of the most core US IT infrastructure projects- government and commercial- depend on IBM 360 assembly code or another IBM system, written decades ago that has been repeatedly scaled to handle the increase in load. Two I can think of: SABRE and the IRS. See more here: https://www.nextgov.com/cxo-briefing/2016/05/10-oldest-it-systems-federal-government/128599/ https://www.nextgov.com/cxo-briefing/2016/05/10-oldest-it-sy... Personally I have a ton of respect for production systems that can be scaled in place for 50 years. But I don't have any interest in learning to run IBM mainframes or code for them- I'm preparing for lots of contract work in 2037.
      - rosebay 4y ago
        [dead]
  - sofixa 4y ago
    > And their mainframes, underhyped to the extreme, that more or less still run the world. More or less, but less and less. Many a bank, airline, etc. has had or has or will have a "digital transformation"/move to cloud/rewrite apps/websites to actually be usable/etc. project to switch away from legacy stuff handicapping them to a more modern leaner tech stack. Mostly because they got shown by newer, leaner competition how it's done (neobanks, low-cost airlines) so finally there is some incentive. And of course the added benefits of commodity hardware (as a Service) being much more easily replaceable and scalable. If you're a big bank/airline, why would you spend billions on mainframes from a single vendor you're beholden to, with all the staffing problems (nobody knows this stuff so hiring is a nightmare), specced for the highest possible load you might get? Instead of throwing it on AWS which "everyone" knows and can scale up/down based on demand. Migrating isn't easy or cheap, but it makes so much sense.
- Chabsff 4y ago
  Kinda-Sorta. It depends on what you mean by "success". IBM has been doing a commendable job at managing expectations wrt/ quantum computing. e.g. from this very article: "The new 433 qubit 'Osprey' processor brings us a step closer to the point where quantum computers will be used to tackle previously unsolvable problems," So we can reliably expect them to ship what they are promissing. However, there is still a massive skew between what QC brings to the table vs what the public (and investors) are expecting from it. At the current trend, anything QC-related is effectively guaranteed to qualify as vaporwave due to the public at large being mislead on the subject for so long.
  - Jabbles 4y ago
    This processor has the potential to run complex quantum computations well beyond the computational capability of any classical computer. I don't think that manages expectations well, the word "potential" is doing a lot of work.
- sebzim4500 4y ago
  Was Watson a scam? I mean the jeapordy AI, not all the completely unrelated projects they gave the same name later.
  - Chabsff 4y ago
    Consider that the Jeopardy stunt was basically a sales pitch saying: "If it can do that for Jeopardy, then just imagine what it can do for you!" There is definitely an argument to be made that this was an empty promise. Not necessarily enough to call it a "scam", but vaporware...
  - qbasic_forever 4y ago
    I don't think it was an outright scam, but its use in medical analysis turned out to be very poor: https://qz.com/2129025/where-did-ibm-go-wrong-with-watson-health https://qz.com/2129025/where-did-ibm-go-wrong-with-watson-he... Definitely over-hyped technology. Probably not a scam though.
  - kvathupo 4y ago
    In light of the large language models from Vaswani et al., I'm curious if anyone could chime in: 1. Does Watson incorporate any deep learning? 2. If not, why? Were disagreements based in business or theory?
  - 29athrowaway 4y ago
    "If IBM Watson can find hidden correlations that help your business, then why can't IBM Watson stem a 3 year sales drop at IBM?" - random Twitter user
- jjtheblunt 4y ago
  Power architecture chips, but that's from a no-need-for-marketing-embellishments classical realm. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power10 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power10 for an example that is current
- kvathupo 4y ago
  Although I'm not up to date on the most recent industry developments, I'd say to be less concerned about the number of qubits, and more concerned about the gate fidelity and qubit coherence. Certainly, you want a quantum computer that you can actually use [1]! It's also important to distinguish between the adiabatic quantum computing of companies like D-Wave with their many qubits and the gate-based quantum computing of Google, IonQ, IBM, etc. with their fewer qubits. [1] - https://arxiv.org/abs/2110.03137 https://arxiv.org/abs/2110.03137
- sophacles 4y ago
  Those flagship projects that failed technologically were amazing successes. > received copious media praise That's the success criteria. IBM makes money in lots of ways. The last few decades they've struggled with public perception, and an image of being "has-been". This has hurt their ability to get talent and enter new markets. Having your name next to neat, futuristic tech is a good way to counter that image. Even more so when it's things like Watson and Quantum computing that have real nerds doing actual fawning over the tech.
- jimbo99912 4y ago
  IBM makes an enormous amount of non-vaporware, you just never hear about it because the licensing situation for most of it is so atrocious and its probably exclusive to their system z (mainframe) architecture. IBM systems is a top tier organization being held back by incredibly restrictive business practices. I'm lucky to have been in positions to see a lot of what they work on, but it's always tough to explain to folks who's most memorable recent exposure to IBM products is likely to be some sort of PR stunt like Watson. I've held out hope for a political change within the organization in favor of the systems folks for a long time, but any success on that front has been pretty limited so far.
- 29athrowaway 4y ago
  Kasparov was disappointed with Deep Blue. After the rematch won by Deep Blue (the first match was won by Kasparov), IBM relocated the machine then disassembled everything.
jimmar 4y ago
I watched some of the presentations at their recent quantum summit. They have smart people building sophisticated systems, but they struggled to define meaningful use cases for quantum computing. I've noticed a "tell" for when product launches will likely fail. If the presenter cannot create a strong argument for the product, but instead tells the audience some version of, "we're excited to see what use cases you create for our product," then the product is likely to fail. IBM did this several times at the Quantum summit. It's basically saying, "Here's a thing. Hopefully you can find something useful to do with it, because we can't. But here are our hardware specs." I'll pay more attention when IBM and other quantum players start to talk about applications more than numbers of qubits.
- jandrese 4y ago
  LASERs had the same problem when they were first invented. It took serious cost reductions before they became practical outside of laboratory environments. Now they are everywhere. I think Quantum computing is currently in the same place. The systems just aren't practical yet, but if they survive and iterate a few more times it could be revolutionary.
  - Chabsff 4y ago
    Revolutionise what? Sure, we can hand-wave away that it'll revolutionise *something*, but there's no direct candidate on the horizon. As of today, at best we can hope that more accurate quantum simulations could lead to some breakthrough tech, but that's a very indirect revolution at best. With LASER, at least, there was a bunch of known use-cases that were blocked by the availability of the tech. There are no such equivalents here.
    - pooloo 4y ago
      If you build it, they will come... Most of the time, technology that is leading edge is only there for a short period, as its either bought out or lacks funding. With IBM, they have the funds to start revolutions, and have a larger vision at play. However, quantum computing is not a widely accepted concept due to a lot of its complexities, which is likely why its such a niche area. Given time and money, which IBM can handle, something will happen.
asow92 4y ago
Where is a good place (if there is one) to learn about quantum software engineering concepts?
- nerdo 4y ago
  https://qiskit.org/textbook/preface.html https://qiskit.org/textbook/preface.html
- GavCo 4y ago
  This podcast episode is great as a high-level introduction https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/147-quantum-computing-with-yonatan-cohen/id427166321?i=1000587754014 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/147-quantum-computing-...
- marius_k 4y ago
  https://quantum.country/ https://quantum.country/ it has built-in spaced repetition cards
renox 4y ago
So what's the maximum number it can factorize?
- tromp 4y ago
  We would hear about it if it could break the current record of 21...
low_tech_punk 4y ago
Are we post-RSA yet?
- wahern 4y ago
  If and when it happens, ECC will be broken before RSA, as the latter requires roughly an order of magnitude more qubits for the same classical computing complexity. Given how difficult it seems to be to scale quantum computers, there's likely to be a years-long period between ECC being deemed too risky and RSA remaining viable, at least for some tasks. This might (depending on the precise numbers) also be an argument for Curve448 over Curve25519, apropos a recent Golang crypto project rejection of Curve448. Notably, upgrading to a stronger curve is much more difficult from a logistics standpoint because you have to explicitly add code for each curve to various libraries, and then roll them out globally. Generic curve libraries never took hold after side-channel attacks became common. Whereas for RSA larger keys are trivial to support, and generally already supported intrinsically by deployed software. Some RSA libraries currently cap out at 8192, 65536, or some such for pragmatic reasons (e.g. limiting computational complexity attacks or static loop unrolling), but by comparison this is much, much easier to remedy. Of course, larger keys only buy you a little time. But it will be a mad scramble when (and if!) it happens, so that time will be very valuable, and much money will be changing hands.
dclowd9901 4y ago
Why would they cover up that beautiful machine with an ugly gray box?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
ablatt89 4y ago
What atoms are they using to entangle to create a qubit? How exactly are they entangling these qubits, and re-entangling them post-measurement? I can't find specifics on the quantum CPU architecture in terms of the actual atoms used for entanglement, and how any of the supposed qubits are re-entangled between measurements.
- texaslonghorn5 4y ago
  I think IBM is superconducting
- m-watson 4y ago
  "The quantum computers you interact with in IBM Quantum use a physical type of qubit called a superconducting transmon qubit, which is made from superconducting materials such as niobium and aluminum, patterned on a silicon substrate. Such systems are not natural qubits, but are instead formed by isolating two energy levels out of many to form our approximate qubit." https://quantum-computing.ibm.com/composer/docs/iqx/guide/the-qubit https://quantum-computing.ibm.com/composer/docs/iqx/guide/th...
vivegi 4y ago
From the time Intel released their 8008 microprocessor to the launch of the 80x86 series that ushered in the PC revolution, we have seen practical uses of computers. A natural progression of that chip revolution is what we are seeing as the ubiquitous presence of powerful chips (1000x or more powerful than the early microprocessors) in devices like phones, televisions, tablets, laptops etc., We made progress from the two qubit Quantum computer in 1998 to 54 qubit computer in 2019 to 127 qubit computer from IBM in 2021 to the 433 qubit IBM osprey announced here. Where are the practical applications in Quantum Computing when we are seeing a similar kind of scale breakthrough playing out over the last 25 years?
daly 4y ago
Can all of the qubits be fully mutually entangled? It is my understanding that the exponential speedup with more qubits requires them all to be entangled.
- gpm 4y ago
  Surely? If you can entangle qubits 1 and 2, and qubits 2 and 3, then you can entangle the whole set of them together with a few more operations (definitely polynomial in scaling compared to whole computer operations, maybe linear?). You just need a connected graph between the qubits where you can run pairwise operations on any qubits that share an edge.
sgt101 4y ago
My question : how many qbits in a single quantum circuit can be implemented on this machine. The max would be 433 - but I am guessing that in fact the realist is lower than that. Who has the data?

101 points by mtillman 4y ago

Serious question: is there any reason to trust anything IBM does or says isn’t vaporware? In recent memory I am only familiar with failed projects that received copious media praise (eg Watson, BlueMix). The only project I know of that was genuinely successful is Deep Blue. What successes have they had since then?

rbanffy 4y ago
There is successful tech in the “tech that does what says on the box” and in “achieves good market fit”. A lot of their stuff does 1, but not 2. And their mainframes, underhyped to the extreme, that more or less still run the world.
- rosebay 4y ago
  I didn’t know IBM mainframes run the world? Just curious, care to expand?
  - nerdo 4y ago
    Banks run the world, IBM mainframes run the banks.
    - dralley 4y ago
      >IBM mainframes run the banks. And the airlines, and the logistics companies
    - sophacles 4y ago
      That's a bit unfair to the insurance companies. They have a pretty big say in what happens and also run mainframes.
    - hcks 4y ago
      And mainframes run on concrete floors, maybe construction companies run the world by that logic?
      - nerdo 4y ago
        Mainframes aren't a big truck, they're a series of concrete floors.
        rbanffy 4y ago
        My usual comparison is with cargo airplanes.
    - Nursie 4y ago
      This is becoming less true over time.
  - dekhn 4y ago
    many of the most core US IT infrastructure projects- government and commercial- depend on IBM 360 assembly code or another IBM system, written decades ago that has been repeatedly scaled to handle the increase in load. Two I can think of: SABRE and the IRS. See more here: https://www.nextgov.com/cxo-briefing/2016/05/10-oldest-it-systems-federal-government/128599/ https://www.nextgov.com/cxo-briefing/2016/05/10-oldest-it-sy... Personally I have a ton of respect for production systems that can be scaled in place for 50 years. But I don't have any interest in learning to run IBM mainframes or code for them- I'm preparing for lots of contract work in 2037.
    - rosebay 4y ago
      [dead]
- sofixa 4y ago
  > And their mainframes, underhyped to the extreme, that more or less still run the world. More or less, but less and less. Many a bank, airline, etc. has had or has or will have a "digital transformation"/move to cloud/rewrite apps/websites to actually be usable/etc. project to switch away from legacy stuff handicapping them to a more modern leaner tech stack. Mostly because they got shown by newer, leaner competition how it's done (neobanks, low-cost airlines) so finally there is some incentive. And of course the added benefits of commodity hardware (as a Service) being much more easily replaceable and scalable. If you're a big bank/airline, why would you spend billions on mainframes from a single vendor you're beholden to, with all the staffing problems (nobody knows this stuff so hiring is a nightmare), specced for the highest possible load you might get? Instead of throwing it on AWS which "everyone" knows and can scale up/down based on demand. Migrating isn't easy or cheap, but it makes so much sense.
Chabsff 4y ago
Kinda-Sorta. It depends on what you mean by "success". IBM has been doing a commendable job at managing expectations wrt/ quantum computing. e.g. from this very article: "The new 433 qubit 'Osprey' processor brings us a step closer to the point where quantum computers will be used to tackle previously unsolvable problems," So we can reliably expect them to ship what they are promissing. However, there is still a massive skew between what QC brings to the table vs what the public (and investors) are expecting from it. At the current trend, anything QC-related is effectively guaranteed to qualify as vaporwave due to the public at large being mislead on the subject for so long.
- Jabbles 4y ago
  This processor has the potential to run complex quantum computations well beyond the computational capability of any classical computer. I don't think that manages expectations well, the word "potential" is doing a lot of work.
sebzim4500 4y ago
Was Watson a scam? I mean the jeapordy AI, not all the completely unrelated projects they gave the same name later.
- Chabsff 4y ago
  Consider that the Jeopardy stunt was basically a sales pitch saying: "If it can do that for Jeopardy, then just imagine what it can do for you!" There is definitely an argument to be made that this was an empty promise. Not necessarily enough to call it a "scam", but vaporware...
- qbasic_forever 4y ago
  I don't think it was an outright scam, but its use in medical analysis turned out to be very poor: https://qz.com/2129025/where-did-ibm-go-wrong-with-watson-health https://qz.com/2129025/where-did-ibm-go-wrong-with-watson-he... Definitely over-hyped technology. Probably not a scam though.
- kvathupo 4y ago
  In light of the large language models from Vaswani et al., I'm curious if anyone could chime in: 1. Does Watson incorporate any deep learning? 2. If not, why? Were disagreements based in business or theory?
- 29athrowaway 4y ago
  "If IBM Watson can find hidden correlations that help your business, then why can't IBM Watson stem a 3 year sales drop at IBM?" - random Twitter user
jjtheblunt 4y ago
Power architecture chips, but that's from a no-need-for-marketing-embellishments classical realm. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power10 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power10 for an example that is current
kvathupo 4y ago
Although I'm not up to date on the most recent industry developments, I'd say to be less concerned about the number of qubits, and more concerned about the gate fidelity and qubit coherence. Certainly, you want a quantum computer that you can actually use [1]! It's also important to distinguish between the adiabatic quantum computing of companies like D-Wave with their many qubits and the gate-based quantum computing of Google, IonQ, IBM, etc. with their fewer qubits. [1] - https://arxiv.org/abs/2110.03137 https://arxiv.org/abs/2110.03137
sophacles 4y ago
Those flagship projects that failed technologically were amazing successes. > received copious media praise That's the success criteria. IBM makes money in lots of ways. The last few decades they've struggled with public perception, and an image of being "has-been". This has hurt their ability to get talent and enter new markets. Having your name next to neat, futuristic tech is a good way to counter that image. Even more so when it's things like Watson and Quantum computing that have real nerds doing actual fawning over the tech.
jimbo99912 4y ago
IBM makes an enormous amount of non-vaporware, you just never hear about it because the licensing situation for most of it is so atrocious and its probably exclusive to their system z (mainframe) architecture. IBM systems is a top tier organization being held back by incredibly restrictive business practices. I'm lucky to have been in positions to see a lot of what they work on, but it's always tough to explain to folks who's most memorable recent exposure to IBM products is likely to be some sort of PR stunt like Watson. I've held out hope for a political change within the organization in favor of the systems folks for a long time, but any success on that front has been pretty limited so far.
29athrowaway 4y ago
Kasparov was disappointed with Deep Blue. After the rematch won by Deep Blue (the first match was won by Kasparov), IBM relocated the machine then disassembled everything.

jimmar 4y ago

I watched some of the presentations at their recent quantum summit. They have smart people building sophisticated systems, but they struggled to define meaningful use cases for quantum computing. I've noticed a "tell" for when product launches will likely fail. If the presenter cannot create a strong argument for the product, but instead tells the audience some version of, "we're excited to see what use cases you create for our product," then the product is likely to fail. IBM did this several times at the Quantum summit. It's basically saying, "Here's a thing. Hopefully you can find something useful to do with it, because we can't. But here are our hardware specs." I'll pay more attention when IBM and other quantum players start to talk about applications more than numbers of qubits.

jandrese 4y ago
LASERs had the same problem when they were first invented. It took serious cost reductions before they became practical outside of laboratory environments. Now they are everywhere. I think Quantum computing is currently in the same place. The systems just aren't practical yet, but if they survive and iterate a few more times it could be revolutionary.
- Chabsff 4y ago
  Revolutionise what? Sure, we can hand-wave away that it'll revolutionise *something*, but there's no direct candidate on the horizon. As of today, at best we can hope that more accurate quantum simulations could lead to some breakthrough tech, but that's a very indirect revolution at best. With LASER, at least, there was a bunch of known use-cases that were blocked by the availability of the tech. There are no such equivalents here.
  - pooloo 4y ago
    If you build it, they will come... Most of the time, technology that is leading edge is only there for a short period, as its either bought out or lacks funding. With IBM, they have the funds to start revolutions, and have a larger vision at play. However, quantum computing is not a widely accepted concept due to a lot of its complexities, which is likely why its such a niche area. Given time and money, which IBM can handle, something will happen.

asow92 4y ago

Where is a good place (if there is one) to learn about quantum software engineering concepts?

nerdo 4y ago
https://qiskit.org/textbook/preface.html https://qiskit.org/textbook/preface.html
GavCo 4y ago
This podcast episode is great as a high-level introduction https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/147-quantum-computing-with-yonatan-cohen/id427166321?i=1000587754014 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/147-quantum-computing-...
marius_k 4y ago
https://quantum.country/ https://quantum.country/ it has built-in spaced repetition cards

renox 4y ago

So what's the maximum number it can factorize?

tromp 4y ago
We would hear about it if it could break the current record of 21...

low_tech_punk 4y ago

Are we post-RSA yet?

wahern 4y ago
If and when it happens, ECC will be broken before RSA, as the latter requires roughly an order of magnitude more qubits for the same classical computing complexity. Given how difficult it seems to be to scale quantum computers, there's likely to be a years-long period between ECC being deemed too risky and RSA remaining viable, at least for some tasks. This might (depending on the precise numbers) also be an argument for Curve448 over Curve25519, apropos a recent Golang crypto project rejection of Curve448. Notably, upgrading to a stronger curve is much more difficult from a logistics standpoint because you have to explicitly add code for each curve to various libraries, and then roll them out globally. Generic curve libraries never took hold after side-channel attacks became common. Whereas for RSA larger keys are trivial to support, and generally already supported intrinsically by deployed software. Some RSA libraries currently cap out at 8192, 65536, or some such for pragmatic reasons (e.g. limiting computational complexity attacks or static loop unrolling), but by comparison this is much, much easier to remedy. Of course, larger keys only buy you a little time. But it will be a mad scramble when (and if!) it happens, so that time will be very valuable, and much money will be changing hands.

dclowd9901 4y ago

Why would they cover up that beautiful machine with an ugly gray box?

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

ablatt89 4y ago

What atoms are they using to entangle to create a qubit? How exactly are they entangling these qubits, and re-entangling them post-measurement? I can't find specifics on the quantum CPU architecture in terms of the actual atoms used for entanglement, and how any of the supposed qubits are re-entangled between measurements.

texaslonghorn5 4y ago
I think IBM is superconducting
m-watson 4y ago
"The quantum computers you interact with in IBM Quantum use a physical type of qubit called a superconducting transmon qubit, which is made from superconducting materials such as niobium and aluminum, patterned on a silicon substrate. Such systems are not natural qubits, but are instead formed by isolating two energy levels out of many to form our approximate qubit." https://quantum-computing.ibm.com/composer/docs/iqx/guide/the-qubit https://quantum-computing.ibm.com/composer/docs/iqx/guide/th...

vivegi 4y ago

From the time Intel released their 8008 microprocessor to the launch of the 80x86 series that ushered in the PC revolution, we have seen practical uses of computers. A natural progression of that chip revolution is what we are seeing as the ubiquitous presence of powerful chips (1000x or more powerful than the early microprocessors) in devices like phones, televisions, tablets, laptops etc., We made progress from the two qubit Quantum computer in 1998 to 54 qubit computer in 2019 to 127 qubit computer from IBM in 2021 to the 433 qubit IBM osprey announced here. Where are the practical applications in Quantum Computing when we are seeing a similar kind of scale breakthrough playing out over the last 25 years?

daly 4y ago

Can all of the qubits be fully mutually entangled? It is my understanding that the exponential speedup with more qubits requires them all to be entangled.

gpm 4y ago
Surely? If you can entangle qubits 1 and 2, and qubits 2 and 3, then you can entangle the whole set of them together with a few more operations (definitely polynomial in scaling compared to whole computer operations, maybe linear?). You just need a connected graph between the qubits where you can run pairwise operations on any qubits that share an edge.

sgt101 4y ago

My question : how many qbits in a single quantum circuit can be implemented on this machine. The max would be 433 - but I am guessing that in fact the realist is lower than that. Who has the data?