Google’s quantum computing plans threatened, IBM

[Spinnor]

"Just when it was looking like the underdog, classical computing is striking back. IBM has come up with a way to simulate quantum computers that have 56 quantum bits, or qubits, on a non-quantum supercomputer – a task previously thought to be impossible. The feat moves the goalposts in the fight for quantum supremacy, the effort to outstrip classical computers using quantum ones. ..."

From, https://www.newscientist.com/articl...-computing-plans-threatened-by-ibm-curveball/

 

[jedishrfu]

They did mention in the article that the simulation is a billion times slower than what a true 56qubit quantum computer would be.

The interesting thing is that IBM found a way to reduce the memory and to parallelize the simulation making it useful to check complex quantum calculations in the future. The memory reduction means that they can probably continue to expand the simulation useful for software developers if they make it available online like they do now with their 5 qubit machine.

A few years back UT had developed a classical system to emulate a quantum computer.

https://phys.org/news/2015-05-quantum-emulated-classical.html

 

[Spinnor]

Free 16 bit quantum computer emulator,

http://algassert.com/quirk

The tutorial,



I guess I need to lear the difference between emulation and simulation.

 

[scottdave]

After I read the article, I get a different picture of what's going on than what the headline suggest.The article does tell us that it runs a billion times slower than what a theoretical 56 qubit would do. It sounds (to me) like they want to use the classical computer to check answers from quantum computer rather than "smash the competition"

 

[mfb]

Checking answers is often easier than doing the initial computation. Prime factorization is the typical example here. A classical computer can easily check if a number with 2 million digits has been factorized correctly (your home computer can do that in seconds), but it has no way of doing that factorization in general.