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IBM unveils 127-qubit quantum processor

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Re: IBM unveils 127-qubit quantum processor

#61

Post by cbozeman »

bawolff wrote: post #44
baby wrote: post #11

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.

That's kind of like saying, i'm tired of political news - if we all actually die in a nuclear holocaust armegedon it will be hard to miss.

Actually, what you just said is the equivalent of saying, "We just developed a quantum computer that allows us to solve not just every physical world question we have, but every metaphysical one as well."

Since you're literally comparing the end of most life on Earth, I think its fair for me to compare the development of a computer that provides limitless understanding.

They're both equally ridiculous, in other words.

Re: IBM unveils 127-qubit quantum processor

#62

Post by gre »

ncmncm wrote: post #59
osipov wrote: post #2

surprisingly not a word about quantum supremacy

Maybe because China has that now?

Quantum supremacy just means that a quantum computer is better than a classical computer at solving some (toy) task, not that one country's quantum computer is better than another country's.

Re: IBM unveils 127-qubit quantum processor

#63

Post by krastanov »

intvocoder wrote: post #38
cgearhart wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

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."

Re: IBM unveils 127-qubit quantum processor

#64

Post by scrubs »

rain1 wrote: post #60

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. M…

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.

Re: IBM unveils 127-qubit quantum processor

#65

Post by selimthegrim »

krastanov wrote: post #36
maaaaattttt wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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%2... It is less known that a Russian scientist made…

Yuri Manin is "way less well known"? I just spit my coffee out when I read that.

Re: IBM unveils 127-qubit quantum processor

#67

Post by inasio »

rain1 wrote: post #60

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. M…

It's particularly jarring given that IBM came up with the concept of quantum volume [0]...

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_volume

Re: IBM unveils 127-qubit quantum processor

#68

Post by kvathupo »

rain1 wrote: post #60

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. M…

With the caveat that the paper is from a competitor that I like, this benchmark paper [1] makes me inclined to disregard this result. See figure 1.

__EDIT:__ whoops wrong figure, just read section iv or see the first figure here [2]

[1] - https://arxiv.org/abs/2110.03137

[2] - https://ionq.com/posts/october-18-2021-benchmarking-our-next...

Re: IBM unveils 127-qubit quantum processor

#69

Post by samaman »

rain1 wrote: post #60

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. M…

Also another problem: you now have 2^127 output values leaving the quantum processor. If you're using a hybrid quantum algorithm that requires classical processing as well (which are most algos used today), you'd need more than a yottabyte of RAM. We can get around this problem by storing all 2^127 pieces of output data into other data types that compress the total size, but if you genuinely are trying to use all 2^127 outputs, you'd still need to do some pretty intensive searching to even find meaningful outputs. I guess this is where Grovers search could come really handy, right?

Re: IBM unveils 127-qubit quantum processor

#70

Post by krastanov »

selimthegrim wrote: post #65
krastanov wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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%2... It is less known that a Russian scientist made…

Yuri Manin is "way less well known"? I just spit my coffee out when I read that.

I apologize, what I was attempting to say was "here it is way less known that a scientist in Russia made the same observations at the same time". I will edit my comment.
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