Near-term Quantum Computers Have Serious Challenges

Nextbigfuture was excessively optimistic on quantum computer achieving a smooth takeoff based upon announcements in 2018 with the 72 qubit Google bristlecone, IonQ’s trapped ion breakthrough and a flurry of other advancements in quantum computers from Intel and IBM.

A more recent discussion with a quantum computer practitioner indicates that there are still significant technical challenges for each of the quantum computer implementations.

A paper presented by Google at a recent conference indicates that the 72 qubit Google system did not perform and operate as expected. This means not only will there not be a rapid step up to the next 144 qubit system but Google is working on new designs at less than 72 qubits.

Trapped Ion also has significant technical issues to overcome.

There is still a lot of science to sort out before predictable and reliable scaling can be achieved.

8 thoughts on “Near-term Quantum Computers Have Serious Challenges”

  1. Could the writer of this article be more specific to which conference, paper or author you’re referring to?

  2. So… you can’t do a quantum computer until you can accelerate your qbits to 0.95C?

    Though, I suppose that’s not completely out of the question, given a particle accelerator.

  3. While I knew he had a couple of papers from 2014 updating the ideas in the 1964 paper, I didn’t realize he had a couple more papers in 2017 even more directly related:

    https://www.researchgate.net/publication/316454911_Statistical_Description_of_Nonrelativistic_Classical_Systems

    We prove that any nonrelativistic classical system must obey a statistical wave equation that is exactly the same as the Schrödinger equation for the system, including the usual ” canonical quantization ” and Hamiltonian operator, provided an unknown constant is set equal to ℏ. We show why the two equations must have exactly the same sets of solutions, whereby this classical statistical theory (CST) and nonrelativistic quantum mechanics may differ only in their interpretations of the same quantitative results. We identify some of the different interpretations. We show that the results also imply nonrelativistic Lagrangian classical mechanics and the associated Newtonian laws of motion. We prove that the CST applied to a nonrelativistic rigid rotator yields spin angular momentum operators that obey the quantum commutation rules and allow both integer and half-odd-integer spin. We also note that the CST applied to systems of identical massive particles is mathematically equivalent to nonrelativistic quantum field theory for those particles.

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