International Business Machines Corp. is increasing the pressure on Alphabet Inc.\u2019s Google in the battle to commercialize quantum computing technology.Quantum computers hold the promise of being able to solve difficult problems from fields such as chemistry and material science that are currently beyond the reach of the most powerful conventional supercomputers.<\/p>\n
They may also one day render some\u00a0current\u00a0encryption techniques\u00a0obsolete.<\/p>\n
IBM said Friday it has created a prototype 50\u00a0qubit quantum computer. A machine this size is believed to be close to the threshold\u00a0at which it could perform tasks\u00a0beyond the reach of conventional supercomputers \u2013 a major milestone in computer science that\u00a0researchers in the field refer to as \u201cquantum supremacy.\u201d<\/p>\n
In a statement, IBM said it \u201caims to demonstrate capabilities beyond today\u2019s classical systems\u201d with quantum systems this size.<\/p>\n
Friday\u2019s announcement puts IBM in a neck-and-neck race with Google, which has said that it plans to show a similarly-sized machine capable of achieving this milestone by the end of the year.<\/p>\n
Today\u2019s quantum computers remain too small and too error-prone to outperform conventional supercomputers at most tasks, but the technology is advancing rapidly. A\u00a0number of companies \u2013\u00a0including IBM, Google, Microsoft Corp., Canada\u2019s D-Wave Systems Inc. and California-based startup Rigetti\u00a0Computing \u2013\u00a0are pushing to create machines that businesses can use.<\/p>\n
While IBM and its rivals are keen to lead the breakthroughs in quantum computing, they\u00a0are also increasingly eager to win over new customers. Google has offered science labs and artificial intelligence researchers early access to its quantum machines. IBM said Friday it\u2019s\u00a0making a 20 qubit\u00a0quantum computer available to paying customers through its cloud computing platform by the end of 2017. The company had previously offered customers access to a 17\u00a0qubit\u00a0machine. It also gave researchers access to run experiments on\u00a0both a five and a 16 qubit\u00a0quantum computer over the internet for free.<\/p>\n
The financial industry has also been taking a strong interest in the power of quantum computing. The second investment made by the CME Group Inc.\u2019s venture arm ever made was in 1QB Information Technologies Inc., a \u00adquantum-computing software company in Vancouver and backed by the Royal Bank of Scotland. Goldman Sachs Group Inc. is an investor in D-Wave Systems.<\/p>\n
A conventional computer uses tiny semiconductors to store information in a binary format \u2013\u00a0either a 0 or 1 \u2013 called bits. Quantum computers use different techniques\u00a0\u2013\u00a0often involving materials cooled to temperatures colder than those found in outer\u00a0space \u2013 to create processing units, called qubits, which exhibit quantum mechanical properties. Qubits, for instance, can represent both a 0 and 1 simultaneously.<\/p>\n
And unlike standard bits, which are meant to process information discretely from one another, quantum bits affect one another. These properties would theoretically give a quantum computer vastly more power than a conventional machine.But the qubits\u00a0in all of today\u2019s quantum computers are able to remain in a quantum state for only fractions of a second. As they fall out of this state, errors creep into their calculations.<\/p>\n
IBM said Friday that it has managed to keep its qubits\u00a0in a quantum state for 90 microseconds, which is twice what it could do in smaller systems unveiled six months ago, and is among the best so-called \u201ccoherence\u201d times recorded for qubits made from superconducting materials.<\/p>\n
IBM said Friday it has created a prototype 50\u00a0qubit quantum computer.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":341034,"featured_media":206408,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31750],"tags":[835,9245,1353],"class_list":["post-237086","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-science","tag-ibm","tag-quantum-computing","tag-supercomputer"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/237086"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/341034"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=237086"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/237086\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":237088,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/237086\/revisions\/237088"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/206408"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=237086"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=237086"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=237086"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}