[HN Gopher] IBM demonstrates 133-qubit Heron
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IBM demonstrates 133-qubit Heron
Author : rbanffy
Score : 49 points
Date : 2023-12-20 13:05 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.tomshardware.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.tomshardware.com)
| davidgerard wrote:
| so, uh. What does it actually do? In any applied sense. The
| article doesn't seem to list what it's "useful" for.
|
| and can it factor numbers as high as 35 reliably yet?
| PopePompus wrote:
| This important milestone in quantum computing allows the
| production of press releases which prevent quantum computing
| hype from being completely eclipsed by AI hype.
| tleilaxu wrote:
| Just wait until they can start executing AI-related tasks
| with quantum computing in 20 years time. The hype will no
| doubt be insufferable.
| indymike wrote:
| I don't think that's enough to get over the bar. Need to add
| some application to cold fusion and you've got it.
| sonicanatidae wrote:
| Only if the announcement page has so many ads, the content
| is literally unreadable.
|
| I think then, we'll have it.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Surely AI training can be cast as annealing, so we can get
| double hype.
| yorwba wrote:
| Chasing through a bunch of links, their claim to "usefulness"
| seems to be based on this paper
| https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06096-3 where "Our
| benchmark circuit is the Trotterized time evolution of a 2D
| transverse-field Ising model, sharing the topology of the qubit
| processor" which sounds like a task picked to be easy for this
| particular quantum processor to solve, and maybe of interest to
| some physicists working with Ising models, but not really
| "useful" in the general sense.
| RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote:
| For cracking 1024 bit RSA, I believe we need on the order of
| 10,000 qubits.
|
| So we are 1% of the way there!
| TheIronYuppie wrote:
| do you have some further reading i can do to understand how
| this maps? thanks!
| billti wrote:
| There's a page at https://quantum.microsoft.com/en-
| us/experience/quantum-crypt... designed to explore some of
| the resource needs and concepts on this topic you may find
| interesting.
|
| Disclaimer: I work on the quantum team at Microsoft.
| femto wrote:
| Is there a Moore's Law for qbits, meaning do they increase
| exponentially with time? If so, we are halfway there, from when
| we stated with 1 qbit. log(133)/log(10000) is approximately
| 0.5.
| sgt101 wrote:
| Here is a fit a few years ago. https://miro.medium.com/v2/res
| ize:fit:1400/format:webp/1*0aH...
|
| I think this chip would intersect with the exponential.
|
| So...300 qbits by 2031.
| sweis wrote:
| The best estimate I've seen is that we need about 5-7 orders of
| magnitude more qubits and 1-2 orders of magnitude lower error
| rates: https://sam-jaques.appspot.com/quantum_landscape_2023
| spenvo wrote:
| Who here missed
| https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2023/12/researchers-c...
| Put simply: the breakthrough here (not related to the IBM news in
| parent link) massively cuts the physical qubits needed to do
| error-correcting (in the pursuit of logical qubits). What they
| demonstrated in this regard was vastly more efficient (more than
| the 1000:1 industry benchmark, though it's not apples to apples)
| than the current state of the art (as well as what IBM is hoping
| to achieve in its next generation chip). It seems to have pulled
| game-changing quantum computing years closer to reality. The
| paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06927-3
|
| Sorry if it's seen as off topic, my standalone submission on it
| didn't generate discussion
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38705445
| keenmaster wrote:
| By your estimation, what does this practically mean in terms
| of: we may be able to do X Y and Z in ______ years now because
| of this development and other recent innovations in quantum
| computing.
|
| I'm more curious about this from a consumer angle - anything
| with at least a downstream consumer impact that is exciting?
| And even if no consumer impact for the foreseeable future, is
| there anything "cool" or more tangible than massive encryption
| breaking?
| drkevorkian wrote:
| Don't get me wrong, their (QuEra's) demonstration is incredibly
| impressive, but it seems you've been misled by inconsistent
| nomenclature around the phrase "logical qubit". They've
| demonstrated a 5/1 encoding scheme, yes, but that scheme is not
| anywhere close to being sufficiently redundant to allow for
| deep quantum circuits. When people talk about needing 1000
| physical qubits, they mean to make a logical qubit with
| sufficiently low error rate to run interesting algorithms. In
| the QuEra device, when they say they "made 48 logical qubits
| out of 240 physical qubits", they simply meant that they used
| an encoding, and made no claim about the error rate on those
| qubits being low enough. There is no hope (that I know of) for
| a 5-1 encoding scheme to make error rates low enough. The QuEra
| device would just as well need many more physical qubits per
| logical qubit.
| s1dev wrote:
| I want to point out that the experiment was at Harvard in the
| Lukin group. There is a proposal for constant-rate encodings
| using large quantum low-density parity check codes via atom
| rearrangement which could in principle achieve such high
| encoding rate. That said, it's certainly not mainstream yet.
| https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.08648
| drkevorkian wrote:
| Yes, good point (apologies to the Lukin group). That's an
| interesting proposal, but it seems from a cursory read that
| you would need still need very many physical qubits to
| approach that asymptotic rate, and also you would be forced
| to take a very large slow down due to serializing all of
| your logical operations through a smaller set of
| conventionally encoded logical qubits. That said, I'm not
| current on SOA LDPC QEC proposals, so I'll moderate my
| claim a bit to "the first actually useful logical qubits
| will almost certainly have an encoding rate lower than
| 1/5".
| miohtama wrote:
| Related critical review on IBM's 1000+ qubit computer and on why
| it does not matter
|
| https://youtu.be/XlCsi8zagNw?si=HgayJIHJZNFpRyo-
| nielsbot wrote:
| But it looks cool as hell
| idatum wrote:
| Brace yourself for "Watson" branding and IBM marketing hype.
| sonicanatidae wrote:
| They'd do better naming it the WOPR.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Then they can sell clusters of the things-- double WOPR,
| triple, and so on. Cheese is extra.
| 5- wrote:
| > Cheese is extra
|
| https://chipsandcheese.com/
| yeeeloit wrote:
| > When what used to cost 1,000 qubits and a complex logic gate
| architecture sees a tenfold cost reduction, it's likely you'd
| prefer to end up with 133-qubit-sized chips - chips that crush
| problems previously meant for 1,000 qubit machines.
|
| Is it just me (tired, and overworked) or is this poor writing?
|
| edit: Oh man, this article is dreadful, what the heck? Is this
| ESL or AI or what is going on?
|
| Another example picked at random, that's not even trying to
| discuss a complex topic:
|
| > It's hard to see where the future of quantum takes us, and it's
| hard to say whether it looks exactly like IBM's roadmap - the
| same roadmap whose running changes we also discussed here.
| forgetfreeman wrote:
| This was clearly not written by a human.
| jameshart wrote:
| > ... democratized access to hundreds or thousands of mass-
| produced Herons in IBM's refrigerator-laden fields ...
|
| #brandnewsentence
| bglazer wrote:
| Yes this is borderline incoherent
| noqc wrote:
| Ok, but what's their magic state fidelity?
| IshKebab wrote:
| This article is weirdly incoherent. I thought Tom's Hardware was
| reasonably high quality. Did it get sold or something?
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