Either IBM has cracked optically transparent coatings that cycle from 300 to 1K repeatedly and acrylic that has a metal's thermal conductivity, or it's a sham.
This is consistent with IBM's history of putting computers doing customers' work on display. I am aware of the company doing so in New York and Toronto.
Back in the early 2000s I worked for Cap Gemini in Birmingham England which had a part of the office that was some sort of partnership with IBM GS(I think IBM did the hardware and cap got the services contacts). They also had a big blinkin lights server setup in the middle of the office for clients to see. As a teenage geek in his first tech job I used to love going to peek at it even though I did tape rotation on the real servers in the basement most days.
It's also consistent with IBM's history of just putting what they considered important computers from history on display in their offices.
When I post doc'd at TJW I know they had a big museum like display in the lobby (But this was years ago, who knows if its still there), with ibm computers from history, but also things like babbage's and the like.
>The computer is (said to be) live and in use by companies, so cryogenic cooling keeps the system temperature as close to absolute zero as possible to conserve that precious quantum state.
I think the more convincing argument is that most known applications of quantum computers (sidestepping any hardware practicalities), are for niche problems (in my wheelhouse, quantum simulation), the average person has no (practically advantageous) reason to own a quantum computer.
I suspect that once quantum computers actually scale up so that you can play with them, we'll find all sorts of interesting things to do with them.
However, even now, you can imagine that if quantum computers were small enough, it would be worth it to have it just for the asymptotically fast prime generation with Shor's algorithm. I don't think that's that far fetched. Of course, people wouldn't necessarily need to know they have a quantum computer, but they don't necessarily know the workings of their computers today anyway.
Probably just marketing wank, but I got a chuckle out of "it’s not likely to be something you’ll ever have at home" as if we haven't all heard that before.
21 comments
[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 39.9 ms ] threadReally hard to tell which it could be.
When I post doc'd at TJW I know they had a big museum like display in the lobby (But this was years ago, who knows if its still there), with ibm computers from history, but also things like babbage's and the like.
But can it factors 21? [1]
[1] Why haven't quantum computers factored 21 yet?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45082587
However, even now, you can imagine that if quantum computers were small enough, it would be worth it to have it just for the asymptotically fast prime generation with Shor's algorithm. I don't think that's that far fetched. Of course, people wouldn't necessarily need to know they have a quantum computer, but they don't necessarily know the workings of their computers today anyway.
> "It’s not likely to be something you’ll ever have at home"
I’m curious… what would need to be true to make this statement wrong?
Theres even a python package called quisket.
https://quantum.cloud.ibm.com/