I just tried IBM Quantum Composer[1] after reading through this Colab and finding I didn't know enough about quantum circuits to do anything besides clicking play. Quantum Composer gave me a super simple drag and drop GUI for getting familiar with basic circuits/building blocks.
I made it 20 minutes before having to look up a Bloch sphere (happens when you start experiments with 'S' and 'Z' blocks which add phase shifts). I don't directly use a lot of IBM products, and I had a great experience with this one!
Yup, from my understanding and experience IBM is by far the furthest and easiest to use. As in, I can throw up my python shell, write 20 lines of code, and that thing will run my circuit on a real quantum computer in the next 10 minutes.
So this is a tool for developing and experimenting with quantum algorithms without needing access to an actual quantum computer. It runs in Colab and simulates the expected results on a regular computer. I don’t know whether there are other existing tools in this space, but that seems really cool since it lets regular people explore the ideas behind quantum computing, and makes it faster for developers to iterate on algorithms.
Not exactly new no. QC simulators have been in use since before the actual machine have. And even a schmuck like me has developed a QVM for a phd nearly a decade ago. https://github.com/yvdriess/qvm
Their qvm is probably more accurately stimulating the exact machine behaviour of their hardware.
> Several decades ago, quantum computers were only a concept — a distant idea discussed mostly in lecture halls. Flash forward to today, and the race is on to build fault-tolerant quantum computers and discover new algorithms to apply them in useful ways.
Uhh, they’re still a concept. Fast forward to today and that’s why you only have a “quantum virtual machine” - more like quantum vapor ware.
> The qubit systems we have today are a tremendous scientific achievement, but they take us no closer to having a quantum computer that can solve a problem that anybody cares about.
-- Sankar Das Sarma, Distinguished University Professor, Condensed Matter Theory Center, Univ. of Maryland
> Crazy headlines abound: "quantum computing will change life as we know it," "quantum computing will solve global warming," "Quantum computing will revolutionize science and industry," etc etc. These statements are not based on any research or reality at all, they are not even wishful thinking. The number of known quantum algorithms, which promise advantage over classical computation, is just a few (and none of them will "solve global warming" for sure). More importantly, exactly zero such algorithms have been demonstrated in practice so far and the gap between what’s needed to realize them and the currently available hardware is huge, and it's not just a question of numbers. There are qualitative challenges with scaling up, which will likely take decades to resolve (if ever).
-- Victor Galitski, Professor, Joint Quantum Institute, Univ. of Maryland
No we don't. There exists no physical working quantum computer today. There never has been a working physical quantum computer. There exists a "theoretical model that is simulated on classical computers" which is not a physical working quantum computer.
Me and my wife have been exploring the current state of quantum computing to apply it to procedural generation and games - I don't think we'll be able to create something we couldn't with classical computing, but just moving from a PRNG to what I always call "quantum chaos" is just fun.
I hope, the Haskell-based Quipper [1][2] quantum programming language will get more attention and support by this QVM. The linear types[3] recently added to Haskell make very good fit for quantum computing, unlike many other existing languages.
I have often wanted to know if quantum computing is near or one of those technologies always 'just around the corner'. Should I commit some time to learning the basics so that I am one of the few with cross over knowledge of say quantum computing and agricultural data.
It's the 1950s for it. It's real, people use it, but it's more a toy and has some breakthroughs ahead of it to be at scale.
Fwiw after following it closely for about 3 years now, I wouldn't speculatively load up on it. Even the theory of problems that could benefit from it, if it existed as scale, only has a few
Readit News
I made it 20 minutes before having to look up a Bloch sphere (happens when you start experiments with 'S' and 'Z' blocks which add phase shifts). I don't directly use a lot of IBM products, and I had a great experience with this one!
Link: https://quantum-computing.ibm.com/composer
Their qvm is probably more accurately stimulating the exact machine behaviour of their hardware.
https://aws.amazon.com/braket/quantum-computing-research/
Uhh, they’re still a concept. Fast forward to today and that’s why you only have a “quantum virtual machine” - more like quantum vapor ware.
> The qubit systems we have today are a tremendous scientific achievement, but they take us no closer to having a quantum computer that can solve a problem that anybody cares about.
-- Sankar Das Sarma, Distinguished University Professor, Condensed Matter Theory Center, Univ. of Maryland
From https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/quantum-computing-hype-bad-sc... :
> Crazy headlines abound: "quantum computing will change life as we know it," "quantum computing will solve global warming," "Quantum computing will revolutionize science and industry," etc etc. These statements are not based on any research or reality at all, they are not even wishful thinking. The number of known quantum algorithms, which promise advantage over classical computation, is just a few (and none of them will "solve global warming" for sure). More importantly, exactly zero such algorithms have been demonstrated in practice so far and the gap between what’s needed to realize them and the currently available hardware is huge, and it's not just a question of numbers. There are qualitative challenges with scaling up, which will likely take decades to resolve (if ever).
-- Victor Galitski, Professor, Joint Quantum Institute, Univ. of Maryland
https://scottlocklin.wordpress.com/2019/01/15/quantum-comput...
I wish it weren't vaporware, truly.
[1] https://www.mathstat.dal.ca/~selinger/quipper/
[2] https://hackage.haskell.org/package/quipper
[3] https://ghc.gitlab.haskell.org/ghc/doc/users_guide/exts/line...
Fwiw after following it closely for about 3 years now, I wouldn't speculatively load up on it. Even the theory of problems that could benefit from it, if it existed as scale, only has a few
It turns out you need to understand how a quantum computer works in order to design an algorithm resistant to it.
^ This is a good intro that doesn't do much hand-wavy pop-sci.
Major buzz happened in 2019 but since then, it feels, crickets. Did the NSA swoop in and silence all publication of further development or something?
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/23/technology/quantum-comput...
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