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IBM unveils 127-qubit quantum processor

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Re: IBM unveils 127-qubit quantum processor

#71

Post by cashsterling »

krastanov wrote: post #55
jazzyjackson wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks! Is my assumption of liquid helium running somewhere correct? I figure that's the only way to reach the temperatures required (single digit kelvins, no?)

It is even worse than single digit Kelvin. Liquid Nitrogen with pumping: 40 K for a few thousand dollars. Run of the mill Liquid Helium: 4 K for tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars. But for these devices you need 15mK which is reachable only if you mix two different isotopes of Helium and pump the mixture into vacuum. Such a device is up to 1M$ and more. And the insides of that device are in vacuum (actually, ai…

FWIW... small DR's are under 400k USD. The big ones are ~1M USD or more.

Re: IBM unveils 127-qubit quantum processor

#72

Post by zardo »

filereaper wrote: post #16

>'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…

> So okay we have a 127 qubit machine, what did they do with it afterwards?

Characterize it's performance, review what they've learned, and start on the next design.

We're either thousands of qubits, or a major theoretical breakthrough in error correction away from using a quantum computer for something other than learning about building quantum computers.

Re: IBM unveils 127-qubit quantum processor

#73

Post by sz4kerto »

PeterisP wrote: post #50
krastanov wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 "s…

What near term applications would be possible with just a 100 long-lived qubits?

For example routing algorithms used to change railroad traffic in case of a problem with a junction or track.

Re: IBM unveils 127-qubit quantum processor

#74

Post by 7373737373 »

tcgv wrote: post #58
adrian_mrd wrote: post #6

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)

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-prog...

What does "computational power" mean though? Which specific problem can these systems solve that classical computers cannot, or more effectively?

Re: IBM unveils 127-qubit quantum processor

#75

Post by gigel82 »

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.

Re: IBM unveils 127-qubit quantum processor

#78

Post by piannucci »

samaman wrote: post #69
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 2^1…

You don't get the entire wave-function as output; the wave-function is not observable. Different measurements might reveal information about certain components of the state, at least probabilistically, but those same measurements will always destroy some information. See the No-cloning Theorem.

Re: IBM unveils 127-qubit quantum processor

#79

Post by krastanov »

PeterisP wrote: post #50
krastanov wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 "s…

What near term applications would be possible with just a 100 long-lived qubits?

With long-lived ones, gosh, a ton. When you hear a researcher talk about "logical qubit" or less formally "long-lived qubit" they mean a reliable abstract computational component. When we talk about "physical qubits" we mean the unreliable real implementations like the one from this article. A rough rule of thumb is that you need a 1000 physical qubits to make one logical qubit.

With 100 logical qubits (i.e. 100k physical qubits), you can start thinking about running chemistry simulations on the edge of what is possible with classical supercomputers. That is what I am excited about. There are also optimization problems, and some pretentious claims about quantum machine learning, which I am certain would be fun, but I am not as excited about.

With 100 physical qubits, you can start testing non-trivial control schemes, circuit compilations, error correction methods, and many other building blocks.

Re: IBM unveils 127-qubit quantum processor

#80

Post by Maursault »

krastanov wrote: post #52
StLCylone wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?"

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?

> Is there really any secret today that would be problematic if made public 30 years in the future?

Sure. For one, that all the major earthquakes in the last 30 years, resulting tsunamis, destruction and loss of life, were manmade and intentionally caused by, say, Nabisco. Also, it would be a little shocking to the public if it were revealed there are no humans left, only alien-hybrids.

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