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Google plans to reach a Quantum Computing milestone before the year is out

technologyreview.com

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Re: Google plans to reach a Quantum Computing milestone before the year is out

#2
I was excited to read this article up to the last sentence, a quote from the program manager “We’re trying to get support within Google, and this experiment has been very good to get other engineers talking to us.” to me, this statement negates much of the positive spin of the article. That said, the title does say 'stepping stone.'

My primary professional interest is AI and quantum computing to pushing the field forward seems almost inevitable.

Re: Google plans to reach a Quantum Computing milestone before the year is out

#7
post #5

Are quantum chips supposed to replace the current CPUs and GPUs? Or are they supposed to be "just" another component that we connect to the CPU, the same way we connect GPUs?

We are so far from talking about this that your question is nearly meaningless. Quantum computing has not even been demonstrated yet. This "quantum supremacy" is for a highly contrived algorithm and set up that has very little if any real world use cases.

A generalized quantum computer able to run standard computing algorithms is very far in the future and so much basic research in computing science has to happen before it can be talked about meaningfully.

Re: Google plans to reach a Quantum Computing milestone before the year is out

#8
post #5

Are quantum chips supposed to replace the current CPUs and GPUs? Or are they supposed to be "just" another component that we connect to the CPU, the same way we connect GPUs?

Almost certainly the latter. QC is very good at highly specific jobs, like factoring or searching. Similarly to GPUs, getting the data from the CPU to the GPU is costly. For now and presumably for a very long time, QC has that problem but way worse. (And it wouldn't give you speed ups yet even if the cost was free -- but Martinis asserts that won't take long.)

Re: Google plans to reach a Quantum Computing milestone before the year is out

#9

This is still just an annealer, right? Way cool, just nothing beyond what DWave is offering.

No, it is more than an annealer. I think they are aiming for a 7 x 7 lattice of qubits with nearest-neighbor two-qubit gates and one-qubit operations that are enough for computational universality.

(The noise rates will still be relatively high, and they might not be able to measure [and reinitialize] qubits at intermediate steps, feeding results back adaptively. Practically, that would limit using fault tolerance.)

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