It seems that in the end Israeli mathematician Gil Kalai was wrong. This professor at Yale University has been very critical of quantum computing for several years. In fact, he argues that the increase in the number of states of quantum systems and their complexity will cause They end up behaving like classic computersso the superiority of the former will end up evaporating. It defends, in short, that fully functional quantum computers will never arrive.
However, we currently have very solid reasons to anticipate otherwise. And there are several companies that say they will have a quantum machine equipped with the ability to amend their own mistakes before this decade expires. These computers will be very important because they will presumably have the ability to solve a very wide range of problems with which not even the most powerful classic supercomdators available can deal.
Just a week ago we told you that Xanadu, a young Canadian company founded in 2016, plans to be ready before 2030 a quantum computer of one million photonic cubits with error correction. However, it is not the only company that intends to make this milestone come true. IBM plans to make available to its customers in 2029 ‘Starling’, its first large -scale quantum computer equipped with the ability to amend their own mistakes.
It will execute 20,000 times more operations than current quantum computers
IBM is going to build the ‘Starling’ quantum computer in a new data center that will be housed in Poughkeepsie, New York (USA). This machine will bring together 200 logical cubits that, in theory, will allow you to execute 100 million quantum operations. Logical cubits represent a way to overcome the difficulty involved in the use of hardware or physical cubits, which are extremely noise sensitive, and, therefore, prone to make mistakes.
Each logical ul
Each logical cubit is constructed abstractly on several physical or hardware cubits, so that a single logical cubit encodes a single cubit of quantum information, but with redundancy. It is precisely this redundancy that allows detect and correct errors that are present in physical cubits. Until very recently the number of hardware cubits that was necessary to implement a single logical cubit immune to errors was impracticable, but IBM says it has found the solution to this problem.
Their engineers have published two very interesting technical articles in which they develop the strategy they will use to bring to fruition their large -scale quantum computer and error correction. In the first of these articles, they explain what procedure will continue to process instructions and execute operations in an efficient way. And in the second they describe how they will decode the information contained in physical cubits in an efficient way, and also what strategy they will use to identify and correct real -time errors using conventional computational resources.
As I mentioned a few lines above, IBM says that ‘Starling’ will be ready in 2029, but before its arrival this company expects to reach other important milestones. At the end of 2025 ‘Quantum Loon’ will prove the technology used to connect cubits to a larger distance Within a single chip. In 2026 ‘Kookaburra’ it will be the first IBM modular processor designed to store and process coded information.
In 2027 ‘Cockatoo’ will arrive to demonstrate that it is possible to intertwine two ‘Kookaburra’ modules, and, consequently, that it is viable to connect several quantum chips such as nodes of a larger platform. And finally, after ‘Starling’ will arrive ‘Blue Jay’, which will bring together 2,000 logical cubits that, in theory, will allow you to execute 1 billion quantum operations.
Image | IBM
More information | IBM
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