4 ms·
No, and Shor's is not a good benchmark for these early quantum computers: https://algassert.com/post/2500 https://algassert.com/post/2500
by vtomole 9mo ago
No, and Shor's is not a good benchmark for these early quantum computers: https://algassert.com/post/2500 https://algassert.com/post/2500
- sestep 9mo agoThat's a 404; here's a working link: https://algassert.com/post/2500 https://algassert.com/post/2500
- vtomole 9mo agoOops, updated. Thanks!
- rowanG077 9mo agoI'm not sure you can really call it "early days" anymore. The first quantum computer was in 1998. That's 27 years ago.
- vtomole 9mo ago"early days" means that the 1998 computer didn't have qubits that were below the error correction threshold. Now we have hundreds of qubits below threshold. We'll need millions of qubits like these for quantum computing to be useful. If that take decades, this is the "early days" relatively. It's not only early days in hardware, it's early days in practical applications as well: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.09124 https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.09124
- rowanG077 9mo agoI admit it's early days in practical application. But in hardware definitely not.
- vtomole 9mo agoDepends on what we mean by "early days on hardware". If we mean "we've have been working on this for almost 3 decades. That's a very long time to be working on something!". I agree. If we mean "We just now only have a few logical qubits that outperform their physical counterparts and we'll need thousands of these logical qubits to run anything useful" then we are still in the early days.
- sgt101 9mo agocan you give a bit more information on 100's of qubits below threshold? I wasn't aware of 100's...
- vtomole 9mo agohttps://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09848-5 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09848-5 performs CZ gates on up to 256 qubits with fidelities of 99.5%, which is good enough to run surface codes below threshold.
- avadodin 9mo agoMaybe the real quantum computing was the friends we made along the way