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.
IBM unveils 127-qubit quantum processor
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Re: IBM unveils 127-qubit quantum processor
#42[deleted]
Re: IBM unveils 127-qubit quantum processor
#43> 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?
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)?
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.
Re: IBM unveils 127-qubit quantum processor
#44I'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.
Re: IBM unveils 127-qubit quantum processor
#45Interesting that the number of qubits is approximately doubling every year according to the article.
well Google Sycamore (53 qubits) arrived in 2019, and it's 2021 now - so 2 years (being generous).
Re: IBM unveils 127-qubit quantum processor
#46Interesting that the number of qubits is approximately doubling every year according to the article.
How do we call this 'law'?
Re: IBM unveils 127-qubit quantum processor
#47Quantum 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 post…
The pipes you mentioned are microwave conduits (for various control signals).
0.141" semi-rigid coax, diameter of champions.
Re: IBM unveils 127-qubit quantum processor
#48Quantum 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 post…
My antivirus client won't let me open that second link, claims some kind of malicious activity, didn't look into the details.
Strange, it is a personal blog with literally no javascript (just checked my network tab), might be worth investigating what your antivirus has against it. It's a very good read, so just in case your antivirus is friendly with archive.org: https://web.archive.org/web/20211113093602/https://tamikothi...
Re: IBM unveils 127-qubit quantum processor
#49Earlier 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
That's such a stupid criticism. Quantum supremacy is an arbitrary benchmark by definition.
Re: IBM unveils 127-qubit quantum processor
#50> 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?
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?