IBM stated in the spring of 2016 that it will make its quantum computing technology available to the public as a cloud service.
As part of the IBM Quantum Experience, interested parties may utilize the offered programming and user interface to log into a 5-qubit quantum computer over the Internet and build and run programs.
- The objective of IBM was to push the development of bigger quantum computers forward. In January 2018, the company made the 20-qubit versions of its quantum computer available to a restricted group of businesses.
- Prototypes with 50 qubits are reportedly already available.
- The corporation Google then declared in the summer of 2016 that a 50 qubit quantum computer will be ready by 2020. This deadline was subsequently pushed up to 2017 or early 2018.
- Google announced the release of Bristlecone, a new 72-qubit quantum processor, in March 2018.
- According to IBM, quantum computers with up to 100 qubits will be accessible in the mid to late 2020s.
- A quantum computer with around 50 qubits, according to most quantum experts, might outperform the processing capabilities of any supercomputer today—at least for certain key computational tasks.
In the context of quantum supremacy, Google walks the talk. We'll find out very soon what new possibilities actual quantum computers open up. We may be seeing the start of a new age.
There are still several significant difficulties to tackle on the route to developing working quantum computers:
- The most important is that under the omnipresent impact of heat and radiation, entangled quantum states decay extremely quickly—often too quickly to complete the intended operations without mistake.
- The “decoherence” of quantum states is a term used by physicists in this context. Chap. 26 will go through this phenomena in further depth.
- Working with qubits is akin to writing on the water's surface rather than a piece of paper.
- The latter may persist hundreds of years, while any writing on water vanishes in a fraction of a second.
- As a result, it's critical to be able to operate at very high rates and by the way, even the speeds at which classical computers process data are hard for us humans to imagine.
Quantum engineers are using a two-pronged approach to solve this obstacle.
- On the one side, they're attempting to lengthen the lifespan of qubits, so lowering their sensitivity to mistakes, and on the other, they're designing unique algorithms to rectify any faults that do arise (this is called quantum error correction).
- With the use of ultra-cold freezers, physicists can restrict the consequences of decoherence.
- Furthermore, strategies for dealing with decoherence-related mistakes in individual qubits are improving all the time.
As a result, there is reason to believe that quantum computer dependability will improve dramatically in the future.
However, quantum engineers' efforts have not yet delivered reliably operating quantum computers (as of fall 2021).
Quantum computers are being developed by companies such as IBM, Google, Intel, Microsoft, and Alibaba in the next years. They claim to have achieved great strides in the last several years.
~ Jai Krishna Ponnappan
You may also want to read more about Quantum Computing here.
