Friday, June 23rd 2023
Microsoft Expects to Construct a Quantum Supercomputer Within a Decade
Earlier this week Microsoft revealed its roadmap for the building of a proprietary quantum supercomputer. The company's research department has been making progress with the elusive building blocks of topological qubits over a number of years. Microsoft's VP of advanced quantum development - Krysta Svore - has informed TechCrunch that their team anticipates it taking under ten years to construct and complete a quantum supercomputer utilizing qubits, with a view to perform a reliable one million quantum operations per second. Svore stated: "We think about our roadmap and the time to the quantum supercomputer in terms of years rather than decades."
Majorana-based qubits are extremely difficult to create, but worth the effort due to being inherently stable. Microsoft's quantum team has dedicated itself to hitting a first milestone, with more devices developed and data collected since last year's major breakthrough. Svore reiterates: "Today, we're really at this foundational implementation level...We have noisy intermediate-scale quantum machines. They're built around physical qubits and they're not yet reliable enough to do something practical and advantageous in terms of something useful. For science or for the commercial industry. The next level we need to get to as an industry is the resilient level. We need to be able to operate not just with physical qubits but we need to take those physical qubits and put them into an error-correcting code and use them as a unit to serve as a logical qubit." Svore's team is focusing more on the building of hardware-protected qubits, that are tiny - "smaller than 10 microns on a side" with performance of one qubit operation in less than a microsecond.
Sources:
Tech Crunch, Microsoft Cloud Blogs
Majorana-based qubits are extremely difficult to create, but worth the effort due to being inherently stable. Microsoft's quantum team has dedicated itself to hitting a first milestone, with more devices developed and data collected since last year's major breakthrough. Svore reiterates: "Today, we're really at this foundational implementation level...We have noisy intermediate-scale quantum machines. They're built around physical qubits and they're not yet reliable enough to do something practical and advantageous in terms of something useful. For science or for the commercial industry. The next level we need to get to as an industry is the resilient level. We need to be able to operate not just with physical qubits but we need to take those physical qubits and put them into an error-correcting code and use them as a unit to serve as a logical qubit." Svore's team is focusing more on the building of hardware-protected qubits, that are tiny - "smaller than 10 microns on a side" with performance of one qubit operation in less than a microsecond.
32 Comments on Microsoft Expects to Construct a Quantum Supercomputer Within a Decade
[/HR]
Also, was I the only one who read this as Marijuana the first time I skimmed over the article?
I say it won't happen.
In the next 10 years, processing power will more than quadruple and AI will get better, but quantum computing probably won't happen till 2100AD.
Something relatively new.
And i bet we won't see a Windows 12 before 2028.
Or maybe the word is there, but at the same time its not...
One area where quantum supercomputers can make a big difference is in the field of drug discovery. Developing new medicines can be a long and expensive process. Scientists need to analyze large amounts of data and simulate how different chemicals interact with our bodies. This process often takes a lot of time and resources using traditional computers.
With a quantum supercomputer, researchers could perform complex simulations and calculations much faster. They could better understand how different molecules behave and interact, leading to the discovery of new drugs more efficiently. This could potentially accelerate the development of life-saving medications, helping people with diseases and improving healthcare overall.
For instance, imagine a scientist working on finding a cure for cancer. They could use a quantum supercomputer to simulate the interactions between thousands of different molecules and cancer cells. This would allow them to identify potential drug candidates that are more likely to be effective. With the speed and computational power of a quantum supercomputer, the scientist could make progress in a matter of weeks or months instead of years.
In summary, quantum supercomputers have the potential to revolutionize fields such as drug discovery, materials science, optimization problems, cryptography, and more. They could help us solve complex problems faster, leading to advancements that benefit society as a whole.
At the same time complex to get there.
A) Track even moar browsing history of even moar people and use that data to push even moar ads to moar people from moar advertisers
B) Develop even moar sophisticated hacking schemes, email scams, phishing and DOS attacks
C) Drain your data stores and bank accounts faster
it is wave or particle depending on whether it observes or not; it can measure speed or location but never both, one or the other; sometimes it's here and sometimes it's there, probabilistically. Etc, etc, etc!
Oh dear! You see, the intoxication of quantum scientists lies in the tendency to never want to refute the data with a very simple question: the acuity of the tools in the measurements of quantum events are sufficiently refined not to present distorted results due to an inadequacy to the demand of precision that the fundamental elements impose? And here is the reason why the alleged "quantum computers" from D-Wave, IBM, Google, among others, are always associated with a constant struggle by engineers to make the produced data stable and without errors; they implement a colossal myriad of algorithmic corrections and structural redesigns to get around the errors in the calculations, but they never manage to eliminate them. The quantum computing practiced until today is, in my view, an analogical computation on the margins of the quantum scale but that never safely enters it.