IBM forges entanglement to double quantum simulations by 'cutting up a larger circuit into smaller circuits'

IBM says it has found a way to solve problems using fewer qubits than before, effectively doubling the capability of a quantum system by combining both quantum and classical resources. These claims come in a recently published research paper, in which an IBM team demonstrated what it calls "entanglement forging" to simulate …

[Anonymous Coward]

I have a lot more faith that I'll see Fusion Power in my lifetime than REAL quantum computing...

[Hull]

If you are interested in faults in your model ...

... maybe you should take a look at the Jan. 19 issue of Nature.

[fidodogbreath]

I misread the truncated headline in my news feed as "IBM forces entanglement," and assumed they had pioneered yet another way to ensure vendor lock-in.

[theOtherJT]

Those are some odd numbers...

Can someone more educated than me explain why they've picked what appear to be totally arbitrary qubit counts?

[JassMan]

¿Que?

"Smaller circuits aren't just easier to execute. They're also able to tolerate a lot more noise just by virtue of being smaller."

So how come it works the other way round in a camera where your elements need to be as large as possible in order to reduce noise? Otherwise everyone would have binned their DSLRs by now and just rely on phones. I would never consider using a phone for low light shots except in extremis.

Or are they saying that the quantum effects of photons work inversely to those in qubits.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: ¿Que?

The camera isn't really relevant to this. It is showing quantization of the incoming light into the individual photons. The smaller the CCD element, the less likely it is for a photon to land on it, so the less sensitive it is to low light. If each element in your nice FF DSLR is receiving 50 photons, then you can get a decent image. Under the same conditions the elements in your phone camera might be receiving 1 or 2 (or maybe none at all), so you won't see much of anything.

In a quantum computer the challenge is to effectively isolate the qubits from the environment, so that they only interact with each other in the calculation. The smaller the volume of the whole qubit assembly, the smaller the interaction with the environment will be. Some early quantum computing research was done using the nuclear spin of atoms within a molecule. These are highly insulated from the outside world, but it was very difficult to scale the approach up to large numbers of qubits. 5 qubits would probably be OK, so there is scope for testing this.