from Hacker News

Intel's 49-Qubit Chip Shoots for Quantum Supremacy

by amaks on 1/8/18, 11:56 PM with 18 comments

• by Strilanc on 1/9/18, 3:02 AM

  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 "Experimental quantum computing at IBM" [26:58]

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

• by volkadav on 1/9/18, 4:50 AM

  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.)

• by Tempest1981 on 1/9/18, 1:22 AM

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

• by krisives on 1/9/18, 6:46 AM

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

• by wejick on 1/9/18, 3:30 AM

  What is it means for humanity?

• by edcarter on 1/9/18, 12:42 AM

  Is it vulnerable to meltdown?

• by wopwops on 1/9/18, 1:04 AM

  Breaking Bitcoin With a Quantum Computer

  http://fortune.com/2018/01/06/breaking-bitcoin-cybersaturday...

  Quantum Resistant Ledger

  https://theqrl.org/