
Intel's 49-Qubit Chip Shoots for Quantum Supremacy - amaks
https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/computing/hardware/intels-49qubit-chip-aims-for-quantum-supremacy
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Strilanc
Did they give any numbers on the _quality_ of the qubits? For example, IBM's
20 qubit chip has 2-qubit operations with error rates on the order of 5% [1]
(some pairs of qubits are better, some are worse). Quantum supremacy
experiments require thousands of operations (tens of layers of parallel
operations). Qubits with even a 1% error rate per operation just won't cut it.

1:
[https://youtu.be/T-8uuq7Izl8?t=26m58s](https://youtu.be/T-8uuq7Izl8?t=26m58s)
"Experimental quantum computing at IBM" [26:58]

 _(Disclosure: I work on Google 's quantum team.)_

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vtomole
> Did they give any numbers on the quality of the qubits?

No they didn't. I've also had problems finding the benchmarks for their 17
qubit processor. I would appreciate if someone could link them to me.

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volkadav
I guess taking every branch by default avoids the specter of branch prediction
vulnerabilities?

(This is me failing my saving throw vs urge to make terrible nerd jokes.)

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Tempest1981
What makes one quantum computer superior to another? Not number of qubits, I
guess? IBM has a 50-qubit machine.

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ajdlinux
IBM talks about a metric called "quantum volume" that combines number of
qubits with error rate to summarise useful computing performance. See
[https://dal.objectstorage.open.softlayer.com/v1/AUTH_039c3bf...](https://dal.objectstorage.open.softlayer.com/v1/AUTH_039c3bf6e6e54d76b8e66152e2f87877/community-
documents/quatnum-volumehp08co1vbo0cc8fr.pdf)

(disclosure: IBMer, but very different area)

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krisives
I assume these are massive like D-Wave's systems?
[https://youtu.be/60OkanvToFI?t=392](https://youtu.be/60OkanvToFI?t=392)

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wejick
What is it means for humanity?

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googletazer
Better drugs/more complex medicines should be possible. Chemical interactions
are hard to do on classical computers (operating on 5D+ arrays), true quantum
computers should be able to help with those computations.

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wejick
Do you have easy material for me to understand how quantum computing enables
that kind of things? And does it use clasic numerical method computing or
using different kind of mathematical approach? Actually I'm not sure whether
my question makes sense or not

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dilippkumar
I enjoyed reading this paper:

[https://arxiv.org/pdf/0708.0261.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/0708.0261.pdf)

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edcarter
Is it vulnerable to meltdown?

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macawfish
maybe if you run out of liquid helium ;)

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wopwops
Breaking Bitcoin With a Quantum Computer

[http://fortune.com/2018/01/06/breaking-bitcoin-
cybersaturday...](http://fortune.com/2018/01/06/breaking-bitcoin-
cybersaturday/)

Quantum Resistant Ledger

[https://theqrl.org/](https://theqrl.org/)

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lostmsu
It is unknown if BQP >= NP or NP-complete

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tromp
NP-completeness is a property of problems, while BQP is a complexity class
(set of problems). If any NP-complete problem is in BQP, then NP is a subset
of BQP.

But it's not even known whether BQP > P, so we could have P = BQP < NP.

