Researchers Unveil First Ever Blueprint To Construct a Large Scale Quantum Computer (phys.org)

haruchai quotes a report from Phys.Org: An international team, led by a scientist from the University of Sussex, have today unveiled the first practical blueprint for how to build a quantum computer, the most powerful computer on Earth. The work features a new invention permitting actual quantum bits to be transmitted between individual quantum computing modules in order to obtain a fully modular large-scale machine capable of reaching nearly arbitrary large computational processing powers. Prof Hensinger said: "The availability of a universal quantum computer may have a fundamental impact on society as a whole. Without doubt it is still challenging to build a large-scale machine, but now is the time to translate academic excellence into actual application building on the UK's strengths in this ground-breaking technology. I am very excited to work with industry and government to make this happen." The computer's possibilities for solving, explaining or developing could be endless. However, its size will be anything but small. The machine is expected to fill a large building, consisting of sophisticated vacuum apparatus featuring integrated quantum computing silicon microchips that hold individual charged atoms (ions) using electric fields. The plans for creating a universal quantum computer has been published in the journal Science Advances.

Comments

Worlds Fastest Computer

[ssufficool]

Quantum computers are built for specific workloads. Citing this as potentially the worlds fastest computer is misleading. It more than likely will not be a general purpose computer.

Facts and alternative facts

[Mostly a lurker]

In the current political climate, a computer that can simultaneously deal with facts and unfacts may have useful applications. In the past, we only needed to keep track of real data. Going forward, it seems we need to simultaneously handle both actual data and what the user wants to be the actual data. Being able to draw conclusions from the superposition of both versions of reality needs to be extended from social media into practical applications.