
Yummy!
I love that delicious 2025 laughing kookaburra kingfisher name for their quantum chip ... quite unusual!
IBM has unveiled the Heron – a quantum processor it claims has achieved "utility scale" – and a so-called modular System Two architecture that will employ it in production. Heron is the latest installment in IBM's series of quantum processing units (QPUs). The device features 133 qubits – up from the 127 in the previous model …
Of all the fields of scientific progress and achievement, I don't think I'll ever be able to stop believing that quantum computing is witchcraft.
It always reminds me of Discworld passages where a bit of misdirection or trickery is directed at the universe as a whole and works. For a while, at least.
Eh, it's not that weird. I like the Aaronson / SMBC collaboration The Talk as a relatively quick introduction.
(It's funny, too. "Wait, you guys put complex numbers in your ontologies?" "We do, and we like it." "Ewww.")
But basically, if you understand constructive and destructive interference, and can wrap your head around the idea of probabilities as complex unit vectors (which are easy to visualize — just think of the hour hand on an analog clock) rather than real numbers, you pretty much have the foundation of QC. OK, "basically" is doing some heavy lifting there, but really the interference thing is easy to grasp and that gets you halfway there.