IBM Gives Everyone Access To Its Five-Qubit Quantum Computer (fortune.com)

An anonymous reader writes: IBM said on Wednesday that it's giving everyone access to one of its quantum computing processors, which can be used to crunch large amounts of data. Anyone can apply through IBM Research's website to test the processor, however, IBM will determine how much access people will have to the processor depending on their technology background -- specifically how knowledgeable they are about quantum technology. With the project being "broadly accessible," IBM hopes more people will be interested in the technology, said Jerry Chow, manager of IBM's experimental quantum computing group. Users can interact with the quantum processor through the Internet, even though the chip is stored at IBM's research center in Yorktown Heights, New York, in a complex refrigeration system that keeps the chip cooled near absolute zero.

Comments

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[Pseudonymous Powers]

Five qubits? According to understanding of quantum computing, which I got by reading two seconds of various Wired articles before the paywall kicked in, that means that this amazing machine is capable of storing every value between 0 and 31 simultaneously!

Re:what does a quantum algorithm look like?

[Anonymous Coward]

The ones I've seen any detail on behave like a finite state machine, except that the state retains all possible positions from the full range of inputs as modified to that point of the algorithm and a 50% chance of entering an error flow that results in an incorrect answer. Fortunately, the incorrect answer is not consistent, so if the algorithm does have a consistent correct answer it will be the most common answer after multiple executions.

Once your sequence of parallel finite state analyses gives you a strong assertion of a correct answer, it is relatively trivial to test that answer with even a naive classical algorithm.

In theory, a quantum-inclusive machine can solve many problems in 2O(n) time (as in, two separate O(n) sub-algorithms) that would take a classical system O(n*n). How perfectly it scales to reducing O(n!), O(x^n) and similar is beyond my current familiarity.