IBM's New 53-qubit Quantum Computer is Its Biggest Yet (cnet.com) 44
IBM's 14th quantum computer is its most powerful so far, a model with 53 of the qubits that form the fundamental data-processing element at the heart of the system. From a report: The system, available online to quantum computing customers in October, is a big step up from the last IBM Q machine with 20 qubits and should help advance the marriage of classical computers with the crazy realm of quantum physics. Quantum computing remains a highly experimental field, limited by the difficult physics of the ultra-small and by the need to keep the machines refrigerated to within a hair's breadth of absolute zero to keep outside disturbances from ruining any calculations.
But if engineers and scientists can continue the progress, quantum computers could help solve computing problems that are, in practice, impossible on today's classical computers. That includes things like simulating the complexities of real-world molecules used in medical drugs and materials science, optimizing financial investment performance, and delivering packages with a minimum of time and fuel.
But if engineers and scientists can continue the progress, quantum computers could help solve computing problems that are, in practice, impossible on today's classical computers. That includes things like simulating the complexities of real-world molecules used in medical drugs and materials science, optimizing financial investment performance, and delivering packages with a minimum of time and fuel.
Hasn't been tested yet ... (Score:4, Informative)
... from TFA:
IBM is pushing a concept called quantum volume to measure quantum computer performance. It's designed to capture more aspects of quantum computing than just qubits, which can be misleading since other factors can degrade qubit performance. IBM's 20-qubit quantum computers, of which there are now five, have a quantum volume of 16, but IBM hasn't yet tested the 53-qubit model.
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Wow, our measurements show that our quantum computers are faster!
Re:Hasn't been tested yet ... (Score:4, Interesting)
No one in the quantum computing field is competing for speed. They are competing for quantum volume. I swim in these waters and the quantum jiggle problem is an exponential multiplier that's similar to the problem of herding cats.
Look at the photo in TFA and that informs the state of the art. Quantum computing is precisely that immature and precisely that klunky.
Qubit is the currency that sets the bar for the media, the lay, and for funding but it is not what most people think it is. Quantum volume is a little harder to understand but it's the real measure of growth in the field.
Adding more qubits has an exponential effect on complexity. As we approach volume, the difficulty of control rises asymptotically. Never say never, but there's a hell of a lot of decades of work to be done before we get something matching the 1961 IBM 7094 singing "Daisy Bell."
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So it can't run Quake?
Suddenly, I've lost interest.
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Thanks for the confirmation. In particular the exponential difficulty (compared to traditional computers, were you do not need to have everything directly connected to everything and, in addition, can break down computations to be done in smaller steps) is no surprise. Will be interesting to see whether there is a hard "wall" at some size or whether theoretical scaling goes on and just cost is prohibitive. Will also be interesting to see how far this goes up for real computations.
The IBM 7094 was a 36bit ma
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The IBM 7094 was famous for it's contribution to the movie, "2001: A Space Odyssey."
As it regressed when being shut down, it started singing "Daisy Bell," as did its younger self in 1961.
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I am aware.
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I was going to look to the catch. Thanks for pointing it out. Building hardware and then claiming to have it before testing its is pretty easy.
Shore's Algorithm (Score:2)
Any word on them running Shore's Algorithm on this with a suitably big semiprime?
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Unless they made some amazing performance improvements to stop decoherence, Shore's algorithm is not possible on this.
Decoherence comes from the qubits naturally going to their ground state or noise from the environment.
Another major difficulty everyone is fighting is cross-talk: you try to read/write one qubit but it causes other qubits to get written/read.
It's that, but even more so. Quantum bits jiggle. It's random and while we can reduce it, we can't stop it. To do so would violate Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle because we would know everything about a quantum bit because all vectors would be zero.
Jiggles cause adjacent jiggles, similar to what you're describing. I'm agreeing with you. I'm just more pessimistic at the fundamental level.
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So my take that it is pretty much open whether the we will ever get the, for example, 4k Qbits needed to factor 1024 bit RSA? (RSA 1024 being on the low side for security today and basically way too short.)
Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)
640 qubits... (Score:3)
...ought to be enough for anybody.
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...ought to be enough for anybody.
Well played.
Beowulf? (Score:5, Funny)
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these!!!
(Its been a long time)
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In Soviet Russia, Beowulf cluster of Natalie Portmans with hot Quantum grits down pants imagine you!
[Wow, Soviet Russia sounds nice.]
What have we produced so far? (Score:5, Interesting)
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Nothing has been cracked at all using quantum computing. As hard as it may be to believe based on the media hype, no quantum computer has ever solved any problem at all beyond toy problems that can be brute forced faster on a desktop PC (at a cost that is orders of magnitude smaller).
It's probably worthwhile research and may have a really big payoff one day, but it's NOT just around the corner.
Note that D-Wave is not a general purpose quantum computing device. It will never crack crypto, it isn't capable of
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Well, my understanding is a little hazy but all those "heat death of the universe"-quality encryption algorithms that previously could not be brute-forced, CAN be brute-forced with quantum computing.
Not really. For block-ciphers, you halve the key-length, i.e. AES256 remains secure and for AES128 it really comes down to eventual speed (which will be very slow). Also note that this is for a known-plaintext attack and that is the easiest one by far.
For RSA, Shor's algorithm requires something like 4n Qbits and complex calculations. Current recommendation is to use at least RSA 3072. That would mean a 12k Qbit QC that can do a sequence of complex calculations. That is not going to be available anytime soo
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But what do we do about the vertirons?
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As far as I know all the demonstration uses of quantum and quantum-ish devices for real world applications have been proven to be solvable in the same order of complexity with optimized classical computers. So far. Depending on who you talk to, that won't hold for much longer and "quantum supremacy" will be reached, or they'll hit a wall on the preservation of state that makes it impossible to actually get anything useful out of a quantum-ish device.
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Forgive me for being naive, or bad a googling (which I did) but what have we done using quantum computers thus far?
I know they are touted to revolutionize practically everything in the future. But, since we have little ones right now, and paying customers have access to them right now, what has that yielded so far?
Is it just esoteric simulation stuff that is actual progress but too technical and boring to mention, or has someone used a quantum computer and then came back and said "wow, check this out, I finally did X after decades of slogging through with traditional computers, and X has now made Y obsolete overnight!". Or maybe what I'm asking is: has anything been done that has any direct impact on our everyday lives so far?
Traditionally most progress is never this disruptive but, isn't this what quantum computers keep touting? You can do X-trillion times more permutations per second than you could before, so surely breakthroughs will happen every day.
Your question is most excellent and your observations are insightful.
Spoiler: We haven't actually done anything useful at all.
There are two major moving parts here:
1.) Practical
2.) Theoretical
1.) Go look at the photo in the article. You'll not only cringe at the clumsy design, you'll see clearly where we are with practical application. We're at the single-cell stage of building out a functioning adult. "Qubits," (quantum bits) are the lay measure of advancement while the fundamentalists are more concerned w
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Other replies have mentioned Shor's Algorithm, which if implemented effectively would allow a quantum computer to crack RSA. Thus far, the report of a number factored by Shor's algorithm on a quantum computer is 21.
Aside from Shor's algorithm, the thing that I'd be doing with a quantum computer if a sufficiently powerful one existed is running Grover's algorithm - termed "quantum database search", but in practice it's a way of doing brute-force search in time proportio
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Where's the protein folding, the enzyme analysis, climate modelling, multi-body gravity slingshot space trajectory planning cool stuff?
What can it do? (Score:2)
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Generate breathless headlines.
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In particular, what can it do that a traditional computer cannot do just as fast and far more cheaply?
First up is breaking current encryption. It's a cake walk for quantum computing.
The good news is that quantum computers can provide encryption that cannot be broken. Should any party intercept quantum encryption, the whole thing falls apart.
No need to be concerned for now. That capability is many decades away.
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I believe it can theoretically break the key exchange (RSA, ECC), not the actual encryption (AES).
You are applying your belief system to a matter of science. I'm a fundamentalist in the field of quantum mechanics and it's not a matter of faith.
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So far, nothing unless you count generate media hype as a useful function.
IBM Q Experience (Score:1)
Unfortunately ... (Score:3)
"simulating the complexities of real-world molecules used in medical drugs and materials science, optimizing financial investment performance, and delivering packages with a minimum of time and fuel."
These are all long solved problems. Quantum computers were not required.
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In particular, these will not get cheaper to do with QCs either.
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I'm sorry, but these are all NP-Hard problems that we have developed approximations for that are either very slow (and we're throwing tons of compute time at), or we just accept sub-optimal approximate answers.
It's going to take years before we can solve anything like these problems with quantum computers, but when we have enough parallel qbits it's possible that problems that were solved in O(n^2) time will instead become O(n), or even O(1). Not every NP-hard problem will be reducable via quantum computers
Noah's Computer (Score:1)
"The computer is to be three hundred qubits long, fifty qubits wide and thirty qubits high."