Hacker News Reader

Comment by ryanSrich | Hacker News Reader

Is there any practical use for one of these at the moment? As a hobby dev, what could I do with one?

When your school is trying to sell itself, "we run a quantum computer lab" is a good thing. These would appear the cheapest means of qualifying that statement in your international student brochure.

They seem to be marketed for educational purposes. You could simulate them in software easily. They could be useful for research, but they're not directly useful for computing, except as a novelty.

You could simulate them in software easily.

Yes, just like you can simulate an ntsc interlaced screen in software.

Yes, if no one had actually made a useful ntsc screen.

It even comes bundled with simulation software:

"Gemini Mini is a conditionally portable, entry-level 2-cubit system... The device has built-in CASTOR software, allowing it to simulate the operation of 8 qubits."

Not sure what benefit you get from using real qubits vs just simulating them, even for educational purposes.

Real qubits have flaws, and you could experiment to see under what conditions they work better or worse, like by applying magnetic fields. Simulated qubits are presumably flawless, and so you can't experiment with them.

It's at best a joke, quite likely a scam.

No, switch science is a legitimate parts distributor in Japan, kinda like Adafruit.

You could probably compute the prime factors of 15 with one.

Potentially, something like generating high quality random numbers. This assumes a great deal about the fidelity of the qubits and the control software though.

There is much better, faster, cheaper hardware out there to generate random numbers. Using a quantum computer as an RNG is akin to buying an airplane and using it to blow-dry a carpet.

I mean, I'm not sure what else you'd literally do with it. Simulating the claimed 8 qubits would require not much classical processing power at all, unless there is something fundamental about the TRNG behavior/fidelity of qubits. Entanglement is interesting but what are you going to do other than simply demonstrate entanglement? I guess you could run Deutsch's with it. Fun. This seems like more of a teaching machine than anything.

Small qubits count machines could be useful for teaching about qubit operations. I can see several lab assignments based around these machine: measure the readout fidelity, measure the gate fidelity, measure T1 time, etc.

Modern processors already ship with hardware that enables high quality random numbers.

Kind of like the early computers.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com