India gives itself a mission to develop a 1000-qubit quantum computer in just eight years

India’s government has signed off on a ₹6003.65 crore ($730 million) plan to make the nation a quantum computing and communications power by the year 2031. The National Quantum Mission (NQM) aims to deliver intermediate scale quantum computers with 50-1000 physical qubits within eight years. Doing so would be a mighty …

[trevorde]

Remember to put in a back door

To keep the children safe, of course (and so it can be used in the UK):

https://www.theregister.com/2023/04/18/wrong_time_to_weaken_encryption/

[Torben Mogensen]

Waste of money

I don't see quantum computers having any impact outside very specialised areas (code breaking not being one of them). Most algorithms that claim quantum superiority rely on the Quantum Fourier Transform, and that requires highly error-correcting qubits and exact rotations in quantum vector spaces to a precision of 1/2^n parts of a full rotation (for n bits). A college of mine who works with quantum computers say that you need at least 1000 qubits to make one error-correcting qubit, and that the current precision of rotation is about 1/8 of a full rotation. So 1000 qubits is not going to shake anything -- you need about a million to get enough error-correcting qubits for breaking RSA, and about 2¹ºº times better precision for rotations. And well before that, encryption will use more bits (and better algorithms), so quantum computers will never catch up.

India would get much more payback by investing in research in solar cell and battery technology -- that is definitely going to have an economic impact, and it is much more realistic than QC.

[KingSpammerNerd]

Re: Waste of money

Indian here. Sure, we're extremely late to the semiconductor and quantum computing race. Sure, making them commercially viable will be extremely difficult, but I wouldn't call either a waste of money. Developing the technology for strategic reasons alone is worth it for us. After all, with how tangled geopolitics can get (and how far our currency has depreciated), we should really stop relying on imported tech for defence and commercial applications, whether it's the hardware itself or the IP behind it.

All this aside, I doubt whether any of these targets can actually be met in this time frame.

[vtcodger]

Re: Waste of money

Upvoted because the post seems to agree with my VERY vague notions of quantum computing. Not that I understand quantum. I most certainly do not. But to the extent that I do, I'm developing a slowly growing feeling that once the smoke and mirrors are dispersed, there's nothing there. The magician, cape, hat, rabbits, doves, and gorgeous assistant are gone. The stage as well. Don't exist. Very likely never did.

[NoneSuch]

Thanks For All The Fish.

For 699 million I'll tell you the answer.

It's "42."