Friday, December 15, 2017

IBM signs up banks for QC

A reader alerts me to this Bloomberg story:
International Business Machines Corp. has signed up several prominent banks as well as industrial and technology companies to start experimenting with its quantum computers. ...

IBM is competing with Alphabet Inc.’s Google, Microsoft Corp., Intel Corp., Canadian company D-Wave Systems Inc. and California-based Rigetti Computing as well as a number of other small start-ups to commercialize the technology. Many of these companies plan to offer access to quantum computers through their cloud computing networks and see it as a future selling point.

For now, quantum computers still remain too small and the error rates in calculations are too high for the machines to be useful for most real-world applications. ...

IBM is competing with Alphabet Inc.’s Google, Microsoft Corp., Intel Corp., Canadian company D-Wave Systems Inc. and California-based Rigetti Computing as well as a number of other small start-ups to commercialize the technology. Many of these companies plan to offer access to quantum computers through their cloud computing networks and see it as a future selling point.

For now, quantum computers still remain too small and the error rates in calculations are too high for the machines to be useful for most real-world applications. ...

IBM and the other companies in the race to commercialize the technology, however, have begun offering customers simulators that demonstrate what a quantum computer might be able to do without errors. This enables companies to begin thinking about how they will design applications for these machines.
Note that this is all still just hype, prototypes, simulators, and sales pitches.

A few months ago, we were promised quantum supremacy before the end of this year. There are only two weeks left.

4 comments:

  1. If you were in charge of building the quantum computers at IBM and Google and you could not get them to work but wanted to keep your job, how would you handle it?

    ReplyDelete
  2. I'm willing to be actual money that these quantum computer projects receive additional funds from government sources. Keeping the lie alive is what keeps the $$$ coming and the bullshit flowing.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. That's sort of how bitcoin works. As long as people think it is worth something, it is lucrative.

      Delete
  3. I would actually like to know what is the minimum number of qubits Q such that it is impossible to build a Q qubit universal quantum computer? Since IBM has already built a 20 qubit machine, we know that Q > 20. But now also it seems that Q <= 50, given that nobody has come out with a 50 qubit quantum computer yet in 2017, even though that was the plan.

    ReplyDelete