“We have successfully built a 20-qubit and a 50-qubit quantum processor that works,” Dario Gil, IBM’s vice president of science and solutions, told engineers and computer scientists at IEEE Rebooting Computing’s Industry Forum last Friday. The development both ups the size of commercially available quantum computing resources and brings computer science closer to the point where it might prove definitively whether quantum computers can do something classical computers can’t. ...There is a consensus that quantum computers do not exist yet, and they will be created in the next couple of years, if not the next couple of weeks.
The 50-qubit device is still a prototype, and Gil did not provide any details regarding when it might become available. ...
Apart from wanting to achieve practical quantum computing, industry giants, Google in particular, have been hoping to hit a number of qubits that will allow scientists to prove definitively that quantum computers are capable of solving problems that are intractable for any classical machine. Earlier this year, Google revealed plans to field a 49-qubit processor by the end of 2017 that would do the job. But recently, IBM computer scientists showed that it would take a bit more than that to reach a “quantum supremacy” moment. They simulated a 56-qubit system using the Vulcan supercomputer at Lawrence Livermore National Lab; their experiments showed that quantum computers will need to have at least 57-qubits.
“There’s a lot of talk about a supremacy moment, which I’m not a fan of,” Gil told the audience. “It’s a moving target. As classical systems get better, their ability to simulate quantum systems will get better. But not forever. It is clear that soon there will be an inflection point. Maybe it’s not 56. Maybe it’s 70. But soon we’ll reach an inflection point” somewhere between 50 and 100 qubits.
(Sweden is apparently in agreement. Today it announced an SEK 1 billion program with the goal of creating a quantum computer with at least 100 superconducting qubits. “Such a computer has far greater computing power than the best supercomputers of today,” Per Delsing, Professor of quantum device physics at Chalmers University of Technology and the initiative's program director said in a press release.)
Gil believes quantum computing turned a corner during the past two years. Before that, we were in what he calls the era of quantum science, when most of the focus was on understanding how quantum computing systems and their components work. But 2016 to 2021, he says, will be the era of “quantum readiness,” a period when the focus shifts to technology that will enable quantum computing to actually provide a real advantage.
“We’re going to look back in history and say that [this five-year period] is when quantum computing emerged as a technology,” he told the audience.
I cannot think of an example of a new technology where everyone agrees that it does not exist, but will exist within a year or so. Maybe people thought that about Lunar landers in 1967?
Maybe you could say that about autonomous automobiles (self-driving cars) today. The prototypes are very impressive, but they are not yet safer than humans. Everyone is convinced that we will soon get there.
They say they have 20 qubits, but they still need 37 more qubits.
ReplyDeletehttps://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-12-14/ibm-taps-samsung-jpmorgan-daimler-in-quantum-computing-push
“IBM has also recently tested a prototype of a 50-qubit quantum computer – which is approaching a threshold known as “quantum supremacy,” where it may be able to perform calculations that are beyond the reach of a classical supercomputer. But it still produces errors.”