IBM announces 50 qubit prototype quantum processor

originally posted by: proximo

originally posted by: GraffikPleasure

originally posted by: TEOTWAWKIAIFF
a reply to: seasonal

Hehehe!

I think quantum computers will, at first, be something that only nations have (they are that finicky and expensive to operate) . You still need your "classical" computer to connect to the quantum computer (you will not have one on your desk anytime soon). So don't shoot just yet!

This announcement is kind of like an appetizer of what is coming. Next year will be the real race for supremacy.

Please explain further why they keep making these better without releasing a lesser version to the public?

They cost millions, and you have to be a math genius to program one.

Basically a 50 qubit system is inferior to a laptop anyway, but once the qubit start getting into the thousands, then they will quickly become much more powerful than supercomputers for certain types of problems.

Aahhh, that makes sense to me now!
Thanks!

a reply to: TEOTWAWKIAIFF

Far cry from one on every desktop but then again noone really envisaged a PC in every home and in the pocket of every person by way of our mobile devices.

One has to wonder when or if this type of computational technology will ever become mainstream in the way its silicone counterpart has?

What are the potential applications, aside from cryptological purposes, quantum computers will be applied to in the not too distant future?

How many bitcoins can it mine in a second...


Second

originally posted by: Miccey
How many bitcoins can it mine in a second...


Second

It would render block chain useless.

Pretty much any binary encryption technology that relies on classical computing would be rendered useless overnight.

There is also the stability issue (called "coherence" in quantum computing land) but I forget exactly how long that also has to be to have supremacy (you need both qubits and coherence over time to truly have quantum supremacy).

a reply to: TEOTWAWKIAIFF

So..... they are basically saying that a insanely intelligent , quite mad , super computer is in our near future

a reply to: bluemooone2


Maybe. But the noise issue has to be overcome. The good folks at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) decided they wanted to try out what was available on a real world problem. This was last year, October. What was then available for immediate use were IBM's quantum cloud computer IBM QX5 and a Rigetti 19Q system. At the time, IBM was giving 5-qubit use through their web portal (you write programs, send it to the web portal and IBM runs your code). The Rigetti system has a non-quantum computer attached to it so write code in this language called Forest attached to 19-qubit quantum cpu. The way it works is you first send your code to a simulator, get your results, then model it on the quantum machine.

First thing they noticed is that it extremely hard to send info to IBM through the web and work on qubits without it being hands on.

Using freely available pyQuil software, a library designed for producing programs in the quantum instruction language, the researchers wrote a code that was sent first to a simulator and then to the cloud-based IBM QX5 and Rigetti 19Q systems.

The team performed more than 700,000 quantum computing measurements of the energy of a deuteron, the nuclear bound state of a proton and a neutron.

A challenge of working with these quantum systems is that scientists must run simulations remotely and then wait for results. ORNL computer science researcher Alex McCaskey and ORNL quantum information research scientist Eugene Dumitrescu ran single measurements 8,000 times each to ensure the statistical accuracy of their results.

“It’s really difficult to do this over the internet,” McCaskey said. “This algorithm has been done primarily by the hardware vendors themselves, and they can actually touch the machine. They are turning the knobs.”

ornl.gov, news, May 23, 2018 - Nuclear physicists leap into quantum computing with first simulations of atomic nucleus.

They needed to check the validity of qubits and interference. They did real science and the whole sigma calculation write up. That is why they did so many runs! And why it is only coming out now... science takes time.

The team also found that quantum devices become tricky to work with due to inherent noise on the chip, which can alter results drastically. McCaskey and Dumitrescu successfully employed strategies to mitigate high error rates, such as artificially adding more noise to the simulation to see its impact and deduce what the results would be with zero noise.

“These systems are really susceptible to noise,” said Gustav Jansen, a computational scientist in the Scientific Computing Group at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF), a DOE Office of Science User Facility located at ORNL. “If particles are coming in and hitting the quantum computer, it can really skew your measurements. These systems aren’t perfect, but in working with them, we can gain a better understanding of the intrinsic errors.”

At the completion of the project, the team’s results on two and three qubits were within 2 and 3 percent, respectively, of the correct answer on a classical computer, and the quantum computation became the first of its kind in the nuclear physics community.

(same source)

Here is where I am pointing out that mere programming is not enough, you have to know the physics behind the quantum part in addition to the coding language. You are mapping a physical representation of a simple atom onto a quantum system that has not been used before. If you do not understand physics you cannot just map your problem onto qubits.

Anyway, that was then. IBM increased their cloud (IBM Q Experience) to 16-qubits. Rigetti has also offered their own web access to one of their processors.

It is slow going so you might not see super quantum computers soon but it is being worked on by real scientists. There will be other firsts. They need to work on the noise issue some more before we will probably see 20 qubit systems (50 was their announcement and I admit, I got excited about it. But seeing some real world work being done that excitement it dampened down a little).

A better general talk of the same announcement from ORNL:

Arstechnica.com - Cloud-based quantum computer takes on deuteron and wins.

a reply to: TEOTWAWKIAIFF

Decoherence will always be a problem. In quantum computing you cant eliminate it so you have to decide how much your willing to allow. I dont think quantum computing will ever be practical even now it's a simulation. Google has only managed to keep a quantum state for 90 seconds. That's why they cheat and simulate a quantum state.

50 qubits.
Is that a lot?


Right. What's a qubit? (Cosby reference. Too soon?)

a reply to: Phage

Roseanne's Twitter Phage's statement is abhorrent, repugnant and inconsistent with our values, and we have decided to cancel her show make him a moderator.

Is that too soon??



In quantum computing news, there is talk of adding noise via the Quantum Zeno Effect to slow down decoherence and counterintuitively, increase coherence times!

sciencedaily.com - Paradoxically, environmental noise helps preserve the coherence of a quantum system.

ETA: The above is also a reply to: dragonridr, and,...
I think it is more like micro seconds. News is made when people achieve 10 milliseconds coherence because real computation is just an order of magnitude away.

Just when you think you've gotten out, they pull you back in...

a reply to: TEOTWAWKIAIFF

Your sort of right I meant to type 90 microseconds.

The system IBM has developed is still extremely finicky and challenging to use, as are those being built by others. In both the 50- and the 20-qubit systems, the quantum state is preserved for 90 microseconds—a record for the industry, but still an extremely short period of time

And what has been discovered so far the more qubits you use the higher the noise in the system. Bottom line is this is a smoke screen for investor's. There's also something they dont admit any answer given will have to be verified by a standard computer. Because error correction will be huge as well.