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Comment by PeterisP | Hacker News Reader

Yet another task that's essentially a simulation of a specific physical phenomenon, not demonstrating an advantage on any generic computing task.

As the article states, it's 216 qubits; far too small to do anything faster than a calculator for the quantum algorithms that we do care about (e.g. factoring prime numbers, searching, etc) - after all, running a 256-qubit quantum task on a 216-qubit quantum computer effectively incurs a 2^40 slowdown.

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Forgive my ignorance, but this is progress, correct? A stepping stone along the path to "quantum algorithms that we do care about"?

You are not the ignorant one here.

I believe we had publications of multiple other similar scale (200-ish qubit) systems before, and it's progress if and only if the particular physical process (there are many very different, effectively unrelated physical processes which have been used to build quantum computers - many of these other quantum computing systems have little in common) can scale to 100x more qubits without succumbing to noise that destroys coherence. Perhaps this one has this potential, I can't judge that, but they don't seem to be asserting it.

> factoring prime numbers

factoring into prime numbers ;-) (factoring a prime number is trivial, that's why it's called prime)

It's only trivial if you already know it's prime. Determining that is non-trivial enough that a tractable deterministic algorithm wasn't devised until 2002, and its time complexity is thought to be the sixth power of log(n = digits).

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