{"id":150462,"date":"2022-11-18T08:22:23","date_gmt":"2022-11-18T14:22:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2022\/11\/quantum-computing-has-its-limits"},"modified":"2022-11-18T08:22:23","modified_gmt":"2022-11-18T14:22:23","slug":"quantum-computing-has-its-limits","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2022\/11\/quantum-computing-has-its-limits","title":{"rendered":"Quantum computing has its limits"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Error-prone qubits mean quantum systems do not yet surpass classical methods.<\/p>\n

In a talk at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1981, Richard Feynman spoke about \u2018simulating physics with computers\u2019. This was already being done at the time, but Feynman said he wanted to talk \u2018about the possibility that there is to be an exact<\/em> simulation, that the computer will do exactly<\/em> the same as nature.\u2019 But as nature is quantum-mechanical, he pointed out, what you need for that is a quantum computer.<\/p>\n

The rest is history \u2013 but history still in the making. When I recently asked David Deutsch, the visionary physicist who in 1985 laid out what quantum computing might look like, whether he was surprised at how quickly the idea became a practical technology, he replied with characteristic terseness: \u2018It hasn\u2019t.\u2019 You can see his point. Sure, in October President Joe Biden visited IBM\u2019s new quantum data centre<\/a> in Poughkeepsie, New York, to see an entire room filled with the company\u2019s quantum computers. And on 9 November IBM announced its 433-quantum-bit (qubit) Osprey processor<\/a>, although it seems only yesterday that we were getting excited at Google\u2019s 53-qubit Sycamore chip<\/a> \u2013 with which the Google team claimed in 2016 to demonstrate \u2018quantum supremacy\u2019, meaning that it could perform a calculation in a few days that would take the best classical computer many millennia.1<\/sup> This claim has since been disputed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Error-prone qubits mean quantum systems do not yet surpass classical methods. In a talk at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1981, Richard Feynman spoke about \u2018simulating physics with computers\u2019. This was already being done at the time, but Feynman said he wanted to talk \u2018about the possibility that there is to be an exact [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":511,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1523,9,1617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-150462","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computing","category-military","category-quantum-physics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/150462","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/511"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=150462"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/150462\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=150462"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=150462"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=150462"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}