Are We Entering a "Golden Age of Quantum Computing Research"?

Lashdots writes: Last month, an elite team at IBM Research announced an advance in quantum computing: it had built a four-qubit square lattice of superconducting qubits, roughly one-quarter-inch square, that was capable of detecting and measuring the two types of quantum computing errors (bit-flip and phase-flip). Previously, it was only possible to address one type of quantum error or the other. The next step is to correct quantum errors.

In a blog post, Mark Ritter, who oversees scientists and engineers at IBM's T.J. Watson Research Laboratory, wrote: "I believe we're entering what will come to be seen as the golden age of quantum computing research." His team, he said, is "on the forefront of efforts to create the first true quantum computer." But what would that mean, and what other big next steps are there?

Comments

Analogue computer

[Anonymous Coward]

They're analogue computers they can solve the thing they're setup to solve faster than a digital computer.

So for example, if you set up a system that follows an elliptical curve as a voltage (as opposed to calculating the values of the curve in the floating point unit of a digital computer), then it can crack elliptical curve cryptography a lot faster.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analog_computer

The buzzword these days seems to be to call these 'quantum' if the analogue aspect is the phase of a photon, but that's just marketing nonsense.

Re:golden age? with them trying to create the firs

[gweihir]

No, nothing is settled. It may still well turn out that computations do not scale to a relevant number of q-bits and it may be that doing computations takes extremely long and has an increase for more complex computations that eliminates all advantages. In fact, looking at alternative computing mechanisms, such as Josephson gates, it seems quite likely that the hype will keep for another 10 years or so before the community finally admits defeat. One reason could be that complexity of doing computations or number of repetitions needed increase the effort exponentially in the number of bits employs. And unlike classical computers, you cannot divide problems for QCs into smaller ones, you always need enough q-bits to get the whole problem in in one go.

Also, for many problems, QCs are simply unsuitable or do not help much. For example for breaking ciphers in a known plaintext scenario, a working QC reduced the number of bits to half. With that AES-256 is still completely secure and AES-128 may be secure if each of the O(2^64) non-elementary computation steps needed takes long. Even Shor's algorithm for factorization needs O(n^3) quantum gates for n bits and as it is probabilistic, and hence a number of repetitions in addition that also grows in n. It is quite possible to increase n into regions where no known QC can solve the problem. (Currently, that border is n = 5 or so and has been for a long, long time).