Headline, June 30 2022/ QUANTUM : ''' '' COME COMPUTING COSM '' '''

QUANTUM : ''' '' COME 

COMPUTING COSM '' '''

IBM TAKES A STEP IN THE QUANTUM REALM. And the researchers say that the computer has achieved something new to solve big problems.

'' We're entering this phase of quantum computing that I call utility,'' said Jay Gambetta, a vice president of IBM Quantum. '' The era of utility. '' A team of IBM scientists who work for Dr. Gambetta described their results in a paper published last week in the journal Nature.

With their intrinsic ability to consider many possibilities at once, quantum computers do not have to be very large to tackle certain prickly problems of computation, and last week, IBM researchers announced that they had devised a method to manage the unreliability in a way that would lead to reliable, useful answers.

'' What IBM showed here is really an amazingly important step in that direction of making progress towards serious quantum algorithmic design,'' said Dorit Aharonov, a professor of computer science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem who was not involved with the research.

While researchers at Google in 2019 said that they had achieved ''quantum supremacy'' - a task performed much more quickly on a quantum computer than a conventional one - IBM's researchers say they have achieved something new and more useful, albeit more modestly named.

PRESENT DAY COMPUTERS ARE CALLED DIGITAL, or classical because they deal with bits of information that it records as either 1 or 0 - on or off. A quantum computer performs calculations on quantum bits, or qubits, that capture a more complex state of information.

Just as thought experiment by the physicist Erwin⁰ Schrodinger postulated that a cat could be in a quantum state that is both dead and alive, a qubit can be both 1 and O simultaneously.

That allows quantum computers to make many calculations in one pass, while digital ones have to perform each calculation separately. By speeding up computation, quantum computers could potentially solve big, complex problems in fields like chemistry and materials science that are out of reach today.

But quantum computers could also conceivably threaten privacy through algorithms that break the protections used for password and encrypted communications.

When Google researchers made their supremacy claim in 2019, they said their quantum computer performed a calculation in 3 minutes and 20 seconds that would take about 10,000 years on state-of-the-art conventional supercomputer.

But some other researchers, including those at IBM, discounted the claim, saying the problem was contrived.

'' Google's experiment, as impressive it was, and it was really impressive, is doing something which is not interesting for any applications,'' said Dr. Ahronov, who also works as the chief scientific officer of Qedma, a quantum computing company.

THE GOOGLE computation also turned out to be less impressive than it first appeared.

A team of Chinese researchers was able to perform the same calculation on a non-quantum supercomputer in just over five minutes, far less than the 10,000 years the Google team had estimated.

The IBM researchers in the new study performed a different task, one that interests physicists.

They used a quantum processor with 127 qubits to simulate the behavior of 127 atom-scale bar magnets - tiny enough to be governed by the spooky rules of quantum mechanics - in a magnetic field. This is a simple system known as the Ising model, which is often used to study magnetism.

The problem is too complex for a precise answers to be calculated, even on the largest, fastest supercomputers.

On the quantum computer, the calculation took less than a thousandth of a second to complete. Each quantum calculation was unreliable - fluctuations of quantum noise inevitably intrude and induce errors - but each calculation was quick, so it could be performed repeatedly.

Indeed, for many of the calculations, additional noise was deliberately added, making the answers even more unreliable. But by varying the amount of noise, the researchers could tease out the specific characteristics of the noise and its effect at each step of the calculation.

'' We can amplify the noise very precisely, and then we can rerun that same circuit,'' said Abhinav Kandala, the manager of quantum capabilities and demonstrations at IBM Quantum and an author of the Nature paper.

'' And once we have results of these different noise levels, we can extrapolate back to what the result would have been in the absence of noise.''

In essence, the researchers were able to subtract the effects of noise from the unreliable quantum calculations, a process they call error mitigation.

'' You have to bypass that by inventing very clever ways to mitigate the noise,'' Dr. Aharonov said. '' And this is what they do.''

The Honour and Serving of the Latest Global Operational Research on Quantum Computing, Problems and Research Scientists, continues. The World Students Society thanks author Kenneth Chang.

With respectful dedication to the Research Scientists on Quantum Computers, and then  Students. Professors and Teachers of the world. See Ya all prepare for Great Global  Elections on The World Students Society - the exclusive ownership of every student in the world : wssciw.blogspot.com  and Twitter - !E-WOW! - The Ecosystem 2011 :

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