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Comment by dekhn | Hacker News Reader

This is exactly correct. The moment something important happens in quantum computing the community will recognize it as such. In the meantime most of us are just waiting for somebody to do something interesting that couldn't really have been solved (possibly approximately) on classical systems.

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In that sense, this is a pretty big step because for the first time there is a quantum computer that cannot be simulated by a classical one. It's also expected they will have a processor with over 400qubits next year and over 1000 in 2 years. This are huge leaps.

Still they aren't currently doing anything useful and need to prove themselves.

I am surprised to see that growth given my intuition that each additional qubit would be harder than the previous to add to the system.

Are there any moores law type predictions/historical trackers for qubits?

My understanding is that adding qubits is not hard, but using them together is hard. Also, it sounded like some qubits are only added for error correction.

What are the innovations allowing for these large leaps? It seems like forever that progress was extremely slow.

Note: I'm a total laymen and have a single source of information, which I read just before seeing the article on hacker news:

https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/11/ibm-clears-the-100-q...

The Ars article goes into a little more technical detail (a little) than the press announcement.

I wouldn't trust the claim it can't be simulated; right after google declared quantum supremacy another group noticed that the classical solution was actually much faster than google said (and that's before any real optimization work gets started). https://arxiv.org/abs/2110.14502

Also as pointed out, these aren't full qubits, nor does any doubling mean the QC will suddenly be able to do anything useful.

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