IBM Will Sell 50-Qubit Universal Quantum Computer In the Next Few Years (arstechnica.co.uk) 90
Months after laying the groundwork for offerings in emerging tech categories such as artificial intelligence and blockchain, IBM sees quantum computers as a big, if nascent, business opportunity. From a report on ArsTechnica: IBM will build and sell commercial 50-qubit universal quantum computers, dubbed IBM Q, "in the next few years." No word on pricing just yet, but I wouldn't expect much change from $15 million -- the cost of a non-universal D-Wave quantum computer. In other news, IBM has also opened up an API (sample code available on Github) that gives developers easier access to the five-qubit quantum computer currently connected to the IBM cloud. Later in the year, IBM will release a full SDK, further simplifying the process of building quantum software. You can't actually do much useful computation with five qubits, mind you, but fortunately IBM also has news there: the company's quantum simulator can now simulate up to 20 qubits. The idea is that developers should start thinking about potential 20-qubit quantum scenarios now, so they're ready to be deployed when IBM builds the actual hardware.
Hmmm. (Score:5, Funny)
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Yikes! It's starting to happen fast.
In terms of being prudent about encryption, what could one start to do now to prepare for the coming quantum computers?
I'm not certain, but I believe the elliptic curve algorithms are supposed to be quantum computer resistant, right?
Specifically, what kind solutions would enable these kinds of algorithms in tools like TrueCrypt (for local encryption) and PGP (for message exchange)?
I have large amounts of data stored in both formats in cloud backups that I would like to ma
ECC isn't resistant, Truecrypt (AES) is, PGP isn't (Score:2)
Elliptic curve isn't particularly resistant to quantum attacks. It's actually less resistant than good old RSA, given currently popular key sizes for each. If much larger (and slower) keys were used, ECC might survive the first few years of practical quantum computers.
The category of algorithms you use with Truecrypt isn't vulnerable to quantum attacks, as far as we know. Those are symmetric key algorithms, where the same key is used to encrypt and decrypt. AES is the currently recommended symmetric ciph
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Ahh. Thank you!
You jogged my memory... I forgot that only asymmetric algorithms are particularly at risk with quantum computers.
Good news for my TrueCrypt FDE (well, VeraCrypt now). =)
Can you give an example what you mean by belt and suspenders approach?
Basically wrapping one algorithm in another (Score:2)
> Can you give an example what you mean by belt and suspenders approach?
Essentially I mean wrapping one algorithm within another, such that cracking it requires cracking BOTH algorithms.
I don't know which algorithms we'll be using 10 years from now, but for sake of illustration let's pretend it's good old Diffie-Hellman. For the moment, we'll pretend we think DH is quantum resistant. With DH, each party sends their modulus in the clear. Because you can't solve the discrete logarithm problem, knowing th
Combining two unrelated algorithms (Score:2)
> Can you give an example what you mean by belt and suspenders approach?
Essentially I mean wrapping one algorithm within another, such that cracking it requires cracking BOTH algorithms.
I don't know which algorithms we'll be using 10 years from now, but for sake of illustration let's pretend it's good old Diffie-Hellman. For the moment, we'll pretend we think DH is quantum resistant. With DH, each party sends their modulus in the clear. Because you can't solve the discrete logarithm problem, knowing th
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I'd ask if you want one right now, but you'd probably change your mind
The fact that you've observed him wanting one means that the result is now in a fixed position.
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Right, don't believe the spin.
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You appear to be in a super position.
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I really want to buy one but at the same time I don't.
Maybe if you don't look at your credit card bill, you can stay in a superposition of 1/2 bought, 1/2 resisted for a while, but as soon as you look, your world will collapse... Or maybe the decision is entangled with your spouse in which case your spouse can spontaneously collapse that decision for you...
Re:"Will" (Score:4, Funny)
I think we can reasonably be sure that IBM will deliver on time; just not necessarily in this universe.
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The article doesn't say who they'll deliver it to.
What exactly will it be useful for? Factoring 50-bit numbers? Any ideas?
$15 million seems an awful lot of money just for bragging rights. It'd better come in a really pretty box so people can put it in the lobby when they get bored with it.
Re:"Will" (Score:5, Interesting)
>The article doesn't say who they'll deliver it to.
>What exactly will it be useful for? Factoring 50-bit numbers? Any ideas?
>$15 million seems an awful lot of money just for bragging rights. It'd better come in a really pretty box so people can put it in the lobby when they get bored with it.
If it's a general computer then yes. You could implement Shor's algorithm for factoring, Grover's algorithm for inverting mappings (to find keys). There are a handful of non crypto related algorithms for things like simulated annealing.
What no quantum computer to date has done and what a 50 bit quantum computer for $15,000,000 will not do is compute anything that can't be computed more cheaply or efficiently on a traditional computer.
I remain a skeptic that quantum computers can scale up to useful sizes. The rest of the universe wants to bring that low entropy state back into line with the rest of reality and it has succeeded every time so far.
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Any CEO worth his salt will find a way to play Solitaire on it.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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I expect quantum computing would be like battery improvements: something people continue to complain about being hype, even while at the same time it migrates into their everyday lives without them noticing. I mainly expect that should quantum computing chips make their way into consumer processors, your average programmer would never touch them - but backend system library calls that they make would increasingly use them without the frontend developer ever being aware.
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I expect quantum computing would be like battery improvements: something people continue to complain about being hype, even while at the same time it migrates into their everyday lives without them noticing. I mainly expect that should quantum computing chips make their way into consumer processors, your average programmer would never touch them - but backend system library calls that they make would increasingly use them without the frontend developer ever being aware.
Given that the quantum computer requires super-cooling, it's highly unlikely that it's going to migrate into our lives any time soon...
"In order to function as a quantum computer, it has to be super-cooled at all times. The system sits at the bottom of refrigeration system where the temperature is roughly 0.015 degrees above absolute zero."
http://mashable.com/2016/05/04... [mashable.com]
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I thought Qbits was a fancy term for the # of cats involved. My bad.
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Nop, it's actually the currency we'll be using when the cylons are chasing us across the universe while we look for the lost colonies.
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No, Qbits are what you get after you smash QBert with a big hammer.
@!#?@!
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And won't (Score:4, Funny)
In a secret box IBM has a quantum computer. It' ready to ship. And it's not. They call it Computer Advanced Technology, or CAT.
FTLOG -WHY SHOULD WE CARE? (Score:2)
Please, anyone, care to explain why should we care?
In the next 20-50 years when quantum computing is commonplace, what mundane, regular Joe Schmo life things will this help with?
Re:FTLOG -WHY SHOULD WE CARE? (Score:5, Informative)
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It is unlikely that most people will see quantum computers in their day to day lives.
Was it not one of the IBM's bosses who once claimed that the computer world market would consist of four or five computers? Or DEC's Ken Olsen who averred that nobody had the need to have a computer at home? Or Bill Gates who asserted (allegedly, probably just an urban legend) that nobody would ever need more than 640 KB RAM? It is next to impossible imagining a quantum computer in one's pocket, but people in the 60s would have laughed if told about the devices that currently hold in our pockets.
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Its hard to say, because you can't directly translate conventional algorithms to quantum ones, and it's hard to say what processes will readily find a home in quantum computing vs. which ones won't. But if quantum chips were "commonplace", you can bet that any CPU intensive tasks today (graphics, neutral nets, physics simulation, etc) would seek to find ways to offload as much effort to quantum algorithms as possible, where they can be found. Some tasks, such as searching unordered datasets or doing Foure
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One wonders if we'll have someday have a quantum accelerator card sitting next to the graphics card in our workstations.
Q Algorithms. (Score:1)
Some tasks, such as searching unordered datasets...
I have never understood how a device with a handful (50 in this case?) computing elements can do better than, say a 10Mbyte TCAM for a task like this. You can get a TCAM like that for under $100 at the chip level. It seems that Q tech that costs $15M has a long way to go.
A computational problem like reversing a hash key makes a lot more sense.
Moore's law - nine years to a thousand cubits (Score:2)
> I have never understood how a device with a handful (50 in this case?) computing elements can do better
A thousand cubits can do some really interesting things. If cubits follow Moore's law and double every two years, a thousand cubits is nine years away.
Another nine years would be a million cubits. A million-cubit quantum computer may change our lives much as the classical CPU has done.
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For that price it'd better have a REALLY pretty box.
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We're talking about IBM. Look elsewhere for pretty boxes.
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Getting rid of the rest of IBM's U.S. employees?
Quantum supremacy tests will come first (Score:5, Interesting)
One of the major issues is the need for actual empirical evidence that quantum computers can do things that classical computers cannot with reasonable time constraints. Right now, the general consensus is that if we understand correctly the laws of physics this should be the case, but there are some people who are very prominent holdouts who are convinced that quantum computing will not scale. Gil Kalai is the most prominent https://gilkalai.wordpress.com/2014/03/18/why-quantum-computers-cannot-work-the-movie/ [wordpress.com]. It is likely that before any 50 bit quantum computer we'll have already answered this question. The most likely answer will be using boson sampling systems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boson_sampling [wikipedia.org] which in their simplest form give information about the behavior of photons when scattered in a simple way. Scott Aaronson and Alex Arkhipov showed that if a classical computer could efficiently duplicate boson sampling with only a small increase in time then some already existing conjectures in classical computational complexity had to be false. (In particular, the polynomial hierarchy would have to collapse and we're generally confident that isn't the case.) Boson sampling is much easier to implement than a universal quantum computer, although no one has any practical use of boson sampling at present.
All of that said, the "a few years" in the article is critical- it isn't plausible that a 50 qubit universal system will be sold in 5 years. But 10 or 20 years are plausible. It also isn't completely clear how practically useful a 50 qubit system would be. At a few hundred qubits one is clearly in the realm of having direct practical applications, but 50 is sort of in a fuzzy range.
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Because if I understand quantum theory correctly, it both works, and doesn't. There is no measurement for a half binary state in a binary world of absolute on and off. I think pursuing analogue supercomputers might be a better place to start.
A more reasonable argument would be "We need more money to continue milking this quantum cow that never produces anything."
Re:Quantum supremacy tests will come first (Score:5, Informative)
Because if I understand quantum theory correctly, it both works, and doesn't. There is no measurement for a half binary state in a binary world of absolute on and off.
I'm not sure what you mean by "it" here, but pretty much every interpretation of this is wrong. In fact, measurement of quantum superpositions do return specific classical states, with a probability based on the superpositions.
I think pursuing analogue supercomputers might be a better place to start.
We have specific theorems about what analogue classical computers can do. See for example http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0196885888900048 [sciencedirect.com] and https://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0502072 [arxiv.org]. In general, analog computers cannot do error correction and can when used to do optimization get easily stuck in local minima.
A more reasonable argument would be "We need more money to continue milking this quantum cow that never produces anything."
Quantum computing is still in its infancy and is best thought of as still in the basic research category. But even given that, there's been massive improvement in the last few years, both in terms of physical implementations (how many entangled qubits one can process) and in terms of understanding the broader theory. One major aspect where both the experimental and theoretical ends have seen major improvement is quantum error correction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_error_correction [wikipedia.org].
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Because if I understand quantum theory correctly, it both works, and doesn't.
If you're talking about superposition, or decoherence, then I don't think you've understood.
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But (Score:3)
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Yes, but it can't play Star Citizen.
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I imagined a Beowulf cluster of these things and it suddenly existed. It then went on to destroy the universe when Windows 10Q failed an update. However, on reboot, it restored the Universe to what is laughably called "its last known working state."
Hence Trump and Brexit!
I misread as "50 Quid Universal Quantum Computer" (Score:2)
Osborne effect (Score:2)
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It uses Python! (Score:1)
qasm = "IBMQASM 2.0;\n\ninclude \"qelib1.inc\";\nqreg q[5];\ncreg c[5];\nu2(-4*pi/3,2*pi) q[0];\nu2(-3*pi/2,2*pi) q[0];\nu3(-pi,0,-pi) q[0];\nu3(-pi,0,-pi/2) q[0];\nu2(pi,-pi/2) q[0];\nu3(-pi,0,-pi/2) q[0];\nmeasure q -> c;\n" device = 'simulator' hots = 1 experiment = api.runExperiment(qasm, device, shots)
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What are its capabilities? (Score:5, Interesting)
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From my perspective, simulations. For example, a simulation showing the motion of water molecules when water is boiled. Not the current version where we have an approximation of the molecules as they are heated, but a simulation where each and every molecule and its motion within the mass is calculated and shown.
How about tensile or compression strength of solids? Again, instead of an "object" being depicted we could depict how steel is deformed at the molecular level, including how impurities or additiv
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Failure of imagination is real, and can have life threatening consequences - the Apollo 1 being a prime example.
One of the things young kids teach parents quickly: Kids haven't learned what's not possible, so they try anyway, and often succeed where their parents fail. Locks are a great example of it - kids don't 'know' locks only open if you have a key or combination, so they open the locks without either.
The bottom line is that physical limitations are a constraint, but they're very rarely as much of a l
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Re:What are its capabilities? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Asymmetric crypto using Diffie-Hellman. It's a problem a quantum computer can solve easily (compared to a classical one at least.) It's a big thing on the horizon in cryptography, and I wouldn't be surprised if state actors already possess the tech, or will soon. Definitely important enough to land a spot on the weapons ban list, at least.
I wouldn't be surprised if state actors are pushing quantum crypto nonsense to scare people into abandoning actually secure systems.
Thus far nobody knows if scalable quantum computers are even practically possible let alone any clue how to go about creating one.
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Easy, the problem of life, the universe, and everything.
Does it come with... (Score:1)
A Cat? or 50 Cats?
Vaporware (Score:2)
Yea right and 2017 is the year of a working 100 MW compact fusion reactor prototype from Lockheed Martin.
IBM will not have a 50 qubit quantum computer in the next few years using a definition of the word "few" anyone recognizes.
Why? (Score:2)
Shouldn't they focus on making the virtual Q-bits as good as possible, then sell Q-bit computing as a service?