First Browser-Based Quantum Computer Simulator Released

greg65535 (1209048) writes "Following the trend of on-line coding playgrounds like JSFiddle or CodePen, Google researchers unveiled the first browser-based, GPU-powered Quantum Computing Playground. With a typical GPU card you can simulate up to 22 qubits, write, debug, and share your programs, visualize the quantum state in 2D and 3D, see quantum factorization and quantum search in action, and even... execute your code backwards."

Comments

Well, not exactly.

[Anonymous Coward]

They both released it and didn't release it simultaneously.

Re:Well, not exactly.

[Travis Mansbridge]

Until we observed this article.

even... execute your code backwards.

[quax]

This is actually a requirement for such a simulator as all unitary QM transformations are reversible.

It's kind of ironic that Google released this project given that they are at the same time heavily betting on D-Wave with a radically different approach to QM than the Gate based model.

The D-Wave founder Geordie Rose is know for disparaging the Quantum Gate based model as completely impractical, and in turn other QC researchers have been very critical of his approach to the matter. Spawning a contentious controversy almost as old as the Canadian start-up itself.

Re:even... execute your code backwards.

[Beck_Neard]

Well let's compare. Geordie Rose spent years and millions of dollars trying (and succeeding) in building a computational device that works on radically different principles than existing computer tech, is actually useful for a lot of real-world tasks, and consumes virtually zero power - a huge feat in itself, even if it's not really a "quantum computer" in the traditional sense of the word. Whereas those people disagreeing with him are all ivory tower academics who have not built and do not plan to build any hardware. The most egregious of which is Scott Aaronson who is known for his delusional rants on everything from neuroscience to fundamental physics. I wonder which one has their head grounded more firmly in reality.

But seriously though, the fundamental principles of gate-based and adiabatic quantum computing aren't that different; it's more a continuum where on one end you have highly decoherent classical behavior, on the other you have pure quantum behavior, and in the middle you have quantum+noise behavior where tiny entanglements are being generated and decohered on a rapid scale that is too short to do quantum computing but long enough to do adiabatic quantum computing. It's possible that by investing in AQC technology, as the technology matures it will give better and better entanglement and eventually approach a pure quantum computer in capability.

Re:If each of those is 22 qubits...

[stoploss]

Would a simple botnet be able to easily crack all encryption crackable by quantum computing, or are there better ways to go at it given a botnet?

Yes it is crackable using a bother simulating a quantum computer, in the same sense that you would be able to simulate a quantum computer solving the traveling salesman problem by using a botnet. Or by using a massively parallel supercomputer.

That is to say, the quantum computer simulation is Turing computable. This really doesn't help for anything more than trivial problems, much like pointing out the Halting Problem is decidable if you "simply" observe the Turing machine for the appropriate Busy Beaver function's number of execution steps.

More succinctly, the simulation would gain you nothing over a direct parallel processing attack on the key space, and in fact the quantum computer simulation would add execution overhead that would reduce efficiency compared to straightforward brute force attacks.