Thank you for introducing us to the word "turducken" which I'm sure can acquire an entirely different meaning.
Honeywell, I blew up the qubits: Thermostat maker to offer cloud access to 'world's most powerful quantum computer' within months
Honeywell International, a business known to most folks mainly for its thermostats, claims to have achieved a breakthrough in quantum computing. On Tuesday, the American mega-manufacturer plans to announce that within three months, it will offer cloud-based access to the world's most powerful quantum computer, as measured by …
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Wednesday 4th March 2020 05:01 GMT Snake
Turducken
Give never read about it on that side of the pond?
You should also read about the other ridiculous holiday season bird idea, deep frying your 16+ pound turkey. And a few of the home-destroying fires that inevitably result from it :D
Ah, America. (We're) Always entertaining on the "stupid human tricks" rating scale.
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Tuesday 3rd March 2020 15:24 GMT Annihilator
It's the other way around. Thermostat makers have been turning to quantum computing to solve the problem of how to have the heating both on and off simultaneously.
It's the only solution to the ever present argument between husband and wife as to whether it's too hot or too cold in the room.
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Tuesday 3rd March 2020 14:10 GMT Pascal Monett
"This is not a science project"
Yes it is. Businesses see no clear problem-solving solution, and they have already invested billions in code and hardware that does solve their problems.
The day quantum computing can solve the traveling salesman problem for actual marketing problems, then it will be invested in. But right now, I don't think that companies have a clue what to with quantum computing. Just like nobody knows what to do with the much-vaunted blockchain apart from pretending that it makes your transactions with funny money anonymous and secure.
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Wednesday 4th March 2020 21:41 GMT Michael Wojcik
Re: "This is not a science project"
There are a number of good applications for general QC. There are practical problems in BQP (and probably not in P), such as some applications of Grover's algorithm - satisfiability and other Boolean evaluation problems in particular. Intelligence agencies wouldn't mind using a fast implementation of Grover's to find the relatively short keys1 used to symmetrically-encrypt some of the vast corpora of data they've stolen. And there's quantum simulation, which many physicists would certainly like to have.
For that matter, Merkle trees ("blockchain" by its proper name) have practical applications, such as in filesystems. BTRFS and ZFS use Merkle trees, for example. So does git.
1The speedup of Grover's algorithm over conventional brute-force search is \sqrt{N}, so for this application it effectively cuts the key size in half. That makes it potentially useful for breaking, say, AES-128, but much less useful for breaking AES-192.
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Wednesday 4th March 2020 22:46 GMT Michael Wojcik
Re: "This is not a science project"
And I forgot to note that NP is very likely not in BQP (assuming P != NP), so no one's going to be using a general QC of whatever size to solve the TSP. You could do an exhaustive search using Grover's algorithm but that quickly becomes infeasible for any NP-Complete problem, even with heuristic pruning. Meanwhile, we have techniques such as graph sparsification which often let us find close-to-optimal solutions for many problems in NP using conventional computing.
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Tuesday 3rd March 2020 15:53 GMT Mike Shepherd
The glorious future
...the American mega-manufacturer plans to announce that within three months...
I think I preferred history done in retrospect. Now we are expected to gaze in awe upon promises. When someone tells me "This will be epoch-making, game-changing or (your own superlative here), I say "Tell me when it's happened, not when all you have is optimistic talk".
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Tuesday 3rd March 2020 20:09 GMT amanfromMars 1
If Not AI Feast, Future Risk is Famine via Novel Proprietary Intellectual Property Deficit
Uttley said Honeywell's quantum computer doesn't have a catchy name. That's perhaps because it isn't something customers will purchase. They'll access it through Microsoft Azure Quantum as a service. No price has yet been determined.
The only real practical danger to guard against is the purchase of access through Microsoft Azure Quantum as a service proving itself to be mostly expensive vapourware rather than anything else much more worthy, valuable and impressive.
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Wednesday 4th March 2020 15:20 GMT Peter Galbavy
I know I'm getting old because no matter how much I read about Quantum Computing I feel much like my parents generation felt when the home computer started turning up. Lost, I'm lost I tell you.
Either that or I'm just too good at failing to see the Emperor's wonderful new outfit.
I suspect the former in this case though.
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Wednesday 4th March 2020 22:46 GMT Michael Wojcik
64-bit quantum volume
A US National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine report on quantum computing from December 2018 said it is "highly unexpected" a quantum computer will be able to crack RSA 2048-bit encryption within the next decade, for instance.
Sure, but this new Honeywell machine has doomed our RSA-64 keys. (Mine was {4294967279, 4294967291}. There's no point in keeping it secret now.)
On a slightly more serious note, 64 effective qubits might seem like enough to, say, break DES - not that we can't brute-force 56-bit DES keys trivially. But applying Grover's algorithm to breaking symmetric keys for Feistel ciphers turns out to require more effective qubits than are needed for basic Grover's alone. For example, breaking AES-128 appears to require at least 984 qubits.
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Thursday 5th March 2020 10:35 GMT Conundrum1885
Its qubits all the way down
Hi, I read an article online posted by the nice folks on "Whistle" and it seems that qubits based on electroluminescence
are a thing now.
Incidentally its said that the phenomenon of trapped light in phosphorescent materials and to a lesser degree OLED is
caused by quantum mechanical effects yielding fascinating effects like quenching it with infrared light.
I have high hopes for my idea of using a ZnS spinning disk as a quantum computer but the problem is using conventional
LEDs makes it too vulnerable to decoherence: has to be single photon ie based on an APD and PLED array.
Incidentally if anyone happens to have a spare IR VCSEL or 10 ideally in the 900nm range, please let me know.
A few spare AD500's wouldn't go amiss.