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Comment by greeneggs | Hacker News Reader

A five-qubit processor has been available for a bit over a year now [1]. Last week, they've announced that they'll make freely available a 16-qubit processor, but for now it is invite-only. They've also announced that they'll sell access to a 17-qubit device.

[1] https://arstechnica.com/science/2016/05/how-ibms-new-five-qu...

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I was listening to a podcast yesterday where Google is basically "guaranteeing a breakthrough" in QC by the end of the year.

Something about the 49-qubit threshold or some such proclamation, so maybe that's something that will finally move the needle.

The Google group in Santa Barbara is building to a 49-qubit computer. If I understand correctly, it'll be interesting for understanding how you calibrate your quantum machine and validate that it is doing what it is supposed to. The algorithms they run on classical computers to validate that device will need a decent amount of supercomputer time. And much bigger devices would be impossible to validate with a classical computer in the same way, so in some sense you hit "the limit" of classical computation and start to move beyond.

But for the computational problems that are useful for applications, which are not very much like the problem they use for validation, 49 qubits is still far far away from beating a classical computer.

Was it this Podcast? http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p052800h

"IBM is giving users worldwide the chance to use a quantum computer; Google is promising "quantum supremacy" by the end of the year; Microsoft's Station Q is working on the hardware and operating system for a machine that will outpace any conventional computer. Roland Pease meets some of the experts, and explores the technology behind the next information revolution."

Yep...that was the one...further on in the broadcast the researcher from Google explains that for "Quantum Supremacy", that "49-qubits" are enough to "leave the fastest classical computer in the dust" or some such hype.

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