The article appears to be saying that they are offering an <i>actual</i> quantum computer as a service, but as I recall, their previous offering was a <i>simulation</i> of a quantum computing environment. Yet, this same article refers to that thing as if it were a real QC. This makes me skeptical that the thing being offered here is a real quantum computer...Anyone here have any insight into whether this is legitimate?
Presenting the pictures of a quantum computer with adbobe flash is an impressive combination of technologies. I hope they are use a different technology stack to develop the OS of that machine ;-)
What are they doing about error correction? Not that it makes this any less impressive (everything starts <i>somewhere</i>), are they simply ignoring the problem?
Does the appearance of quantum computers mean that the effectiveness of programming languages becomes secondary and that ease-of-use/expressiveness will be the most valued trait?
Good job, IBM. You may actually be ahead of other tech companies for once, although Google seems to be breathing down your neck in this area. Others seem to be at least a generation or two behind.<p>One other thing to note is that until recently it was believed that 50-qubit quantum computer would achieve "quantum supremacy". However, IBM itself has shown that we can simulate 56-qubits on a classical supercomputer.<p><a href="https://www.ibm.com/blogs/research/2017/10/quantum-computing-barrier/" rel="nofollow">https://www.ibm.com/blogs/research/2017/10/quantum-computing...</a><p>Now let's see who gets to the 100-qubit quantum computer first and achieves quantum supremacy.<p>Going by recent developments, quantum computers seem to be following a "Moore's Law" of sorts, where their number of qubits pretty much double every two years. We need a few more generations to be sure of this, but it does look like this is the rate at which they are going to evolve.<p>D-Wave, which isn't a universal quantum computer, has in fact been evolving at 2-4x every 2 years (closer to 2x for last few generations).<p>This is exciting because unlike classical computers, quantum computers increase their performance by much more than 2x if their number of qubits double every 2 years.
I look forward to supercool (no pun intended) qSeries mainframes and whatever wild OSs they'll run.<p>Right now, it looks like it's a batch processing like thing, with a single problem using the machine at any given time with long setup/teardown times.
If quantum computing improves as it had been, how does this affect Bitcoin and ethereum as we now know it? Could the blockchain be compromised by a malicious actor who has much less than the majority?
IBM also plans to offer a 20-qubit hosted service this year.<p><a href="https://techcrunch.com/2017/11/10/ibm-passes-major-milestone-with-20-and-50-qubit-quantum-computers-as-a-service/" rel="nofollow">https://techcrunch.com/2017/11/10/ibm-passes-major-milestone...</a>
I've been following quantum computing since D-Wave made its press release some years back. Now I'm a complete skeptic.<p>The huge red flag I can't get over is if it is as so, why can no one validate it after all this time?<p>Why is there the proverbial "it works but not in the way you think it works" (i.e., quantum annealing) or "it works but we can use non-QM systems to simulate it faster, better, cheaper by a factor of a trillion"?<p>If QM computing was truly feasible (assuming that QM does have an underlining phenomena that is physically real), why are the results after all this time so fuzzy?
Quantum computing reminds me of time travel for all the same reasons. This is not a quick win.<p>How would you even validate you built a quantum computer?