Intel YouTubed an unboxing video,
Did they find the cat alive or dead in there?
Intel reckons it's stolen a base in the race to build quantum chippery, by shipping a cryogenically-cooled 17-qubit chip to Netherlands-based QuTech. QuTech is Chipzilla's quantum research partner – QuZilla, so to speak. Regular readers of spooky-action-stories will know a qubit is a fragile creature, losing data if there's …
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When you mentioned Solitaire, rather than think of the card game, I thought the chip was reminiscent of the board game played with pegs.
Linus Tech Tips on Youtube did a video on the Canadian Quantum computer project. The short answer is "yes", they did just cool the one chip with a server(ish) sized cooling system (that needs constant feeds of nitrogen IIRC and a couple of hours to get up... um, down to temperature).
I rather doubt you're going to get down to .02K with Nitrogen. That's firmly in the realm of Liquid Helium, and probably some of the exotic cooling methods, too, such as laser cooling:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_cooling
Dave
P.S. I don't know how they get the shark with the laser beam attached to its head in there.
People get to spend their days trying to understand and develop this stuff and trying to make it work?
My entire career has been a complete waste of time. If I could do it all again, if I could give it all up and start again, I would be doing this stuff. I've had a rewarding career but I haven't enjoyed much of it.
I would love this kind of research with a passion.
Looking over the Wiki entry on this that's can test 2^17 states simultaneously.
If the wiki article is correct then "programming" a quantum m/c is more like the programming of an FPGA than anything else, where you have a quantum gate array" whose connectivity map is the "program"
Interesting side note in the article that the first go at this used "spin" as a parameter and actually dates from 1968 !
I'm tempted to downvote... as at this point it is about getting the states.
"Programming" is not even kinda on the tables, is it? 17 qubits is like asking a computer to count to 17, and stop when it has hit the number I requested.
That's not a lot of computing power (roughly a 4bit integer search in binary). So comparable to a single 4 bit integer storage when it comes to normal computing.
However, putting a lot of these together, and possibly smaller/more efficient ones, and we could scale up to 256bit key length, and then things start to get interesting (though it may need to be the length of the message and key) to get very fast attacks on encryption. [edit] A quick read says we need 4-8k of them. A scaling we did quite easily with transistors. :P [/edit]
(Most of the above is guesswork of the articles I've read, I would hope someone could explain the actual details)
I was thinking that 17 Qubits was a decent advance on the 6 or so Qubits I'd heard for Quantum Computers until recently. However a quick google showed claim of a 51 Qubit array:
https://www.allaboutcircuits.com/news/another-record-for-quantum-computing-51-qubit-quantum-computer-array
Also I was intrigued/mind boggled that even Microsoft is releasing a new quantum computing programming language, with full Visual Studio integration, along with a quantum computing simulator. I did have to do a 1st of April date check ! See the Quantum "Hello, World!" teleportation program example.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/09/microsoft-quantum-toolkit/
So perhaps all this Quantum computing stuff is not so far off becoming useful. I wonder how many Qubits they need before some serious practical uses. I am aware of China using satellites already for a quantum encrypted network.