IBM Q research has built & tested an operational 50 qubit prototype processor, a large leap up from its previous record of seventeen qubits. the corporate is also set to make a twenty qubit quantum system out there on-line for shoppers to try, with an updated superconducting design, connectivity, and packaging. That’ll let users run computations with a “field-leading” ninety microseconds of coherence, allowing “high-fidelity quantum operations,” IBM says.
Quantum computers work much differently than regular supercomputers, taking advantage of weird quantum physics principals like “superposition.” In theory, they’ll run specific programs, like encryption-cracking algorithms, many, many times faster than regular computers.
The fifty qubit system (shown below) could be a significant leap toward practical quantum computers. In Sep, Harvard University researchers aforesaid they built a fifty-one qubit model, but it seems that IBM’s model held “coherence” longer, allowing additional calculations to be done. “We are very happy with this, it is a massive frickin’ deal,” IBM AI and quantum pc director Dario Gil told MIT Technology Review. other players in quantum computing including Google, Intel, and Rigetti.
IBM’s fifty qubit pc is just a prototype, however, it’ll shortly have a working twenty qubit pc that users will try on-line by the end of 2017, with improvements planned throughout 2018. the corporate has already made lower-powered machines available for cloud use, and used a seven-qubit model to simulate a molecule, as an example. IBM says around 60,000 users have run 1.7 million experiments, resulting in thirty-five analysis papers.
Quantum computers have not been able to run programs that a regular computer can not, so the huge speed breakthrough many have hoped for has yet to arrive. Still, Google researchers said last month that a fifty qubit computer they are working on could surpass current supercomputers, achieving an (excellently-named) milestone referred to as Quantum supremacy. The technology is tricky, though, thus there is a good reason to not get too excited. But, there is also a good chance that quantum computers will finally break that barrier sometime within the next year or 2.
