Hello and welcome to Quantum Computing now a podcast about Quantum Computing Basics news and interviews. I'm your host Ethan Hanson. Today's episode is going to jump right into the news covering what's been happening in the world of quantum Computing since we last talked about it. All right, ladies and gentlemen, it's finally here the episode on Quantum fight 2019. We're going to recap what's been going on with Google's claim of quantum Supremacy and IBM's claim that Google's claim is bunk as IBM done enough or is it just put up or shut up time that and so so so much more coming up on this episode. Before we dive into what you actually want to hear Let me just say sorry. It's been so long since I've recorded an episode college is crazy robotics is also crazy. My robotic season started just now in January. I've been doing College stuff since a while back, but that said because of Robotics. There's only going to be about 1 episode 4 February between now and the end of February. It's going to be hopefully an The interview but we'll see I don't have any interviews currently lined up for then and then after that I'm taking March off collecting myself. I'm going to get some material ready. And then I'm going to start up season 2 of the podcast in April as am in a full year since I started but I think that it's close enough and I'm ready to I think move on to season 2 with new music transition music. That's the most common complaint I get which is that my transition music is way louder than my actual talking and yeah, I know that's a problem. There's not much I can do about that other than I guess talk louder. But yeah, it's going to be good stuff. I've got the new art already. I still need to find the new music if you're interested in or you know music that you like that would be good for those quick transitions between the episode intros and sort of The Listener questions that sort of stuff. Let me know still looking for that. All right, we've got a lot to talk about. So since I have not done a podcast episode since October 20th of 2019 speaking of which has everybody's new decade going. That's a that's a that's a trip going from 2019 to 2020. But yeah, I know that it's October 20th because I release that episode the day before IBM responded to Google's claim on Quantum Supremacy. They responded on the 21st and I woke up and I saw that blog post and they went. Oh, no, I've just put out an episode and it's already out of date, but Before we get to that I don't want people to just listen to the first little bit of this and then you know click away. So we're going to talk about some other stuff. First. First thing is the blanket of light and probably saw this gift going around. It's a very satisfying GIF of this like light lattice sort of getting wrapped up and it looks like a blanket of light and what's interesting about this. I will read you the abstract of the paper as always papers are linked in the show notes, but here is the abstract of the paper call titled deterministic generation of a two-dimensional cluster state Abstract measurement based Quantum computation offers exponential computational speed up through simple measurements on a large entangled cluster State we propose and demonstrate a scalable scheme for the generation of photonic cluster States suitable for Universal measurement based Quantum computation. We exploit temporal multiplexing of squeezed light modes delay loops and beam splitter transformations to deterministically generate a cylindrical cluster state with a two dimensional 2D top. Logical structure as required for Universal Quantum information processing the generated State consists of more than 30,000 entangled modes arranged in a cylindrical lattice with 24 modes on the circumference defining the input register and a length of 1250 nodes to finding the computation lengths are demonstrated source of two-dimensional cluster States can be combined with Quantum error correction to enable fault-tolerant Quantum computation. If you've been listening to the podcast for a while or you know anything about Quantum Computing, you know, that that line that last line they're talking about Quantum error correction and fault-tolerant Quantum computation is a big deal. That is the sort of end goal of quantum Computing you want to be able to do all of your computations without any errors, hopefully and get the right answer every time instead of what we have to do right now, which is run thousands of shots on a quantum computer. And hope that the right answer comes out the majority of time and potentially run more than thousands of shots. If you want to make sure that you get the right answer eventually. so yeah, I will have a link in the show notes. There's a phys.org article that has the GIF of the rotating blanket of light that I'm staring at right now and it is it's gorgeous. I don't know how to describe it other than they have squeezed states that get connected into CPR states, which I believe stands for Einstein. Ski, I don't remember what epr state stands for but it is a combination of three names which then gets turned into a 1D cluster State and then that all gets wrapped up into a 2d cluster State. It's such an interesting process that I don't understand fully which is why I am not going into that much detail here, but they essentially are taking pulses of light. That's what they're talking about with the this blanket of light and photonic cluster States. They're taking pulses of light and they're manipulating them in such ways so that they can get more than 30,000 of them all entangled together, which is Fantastic, if you're able to independently control 30,000 of these for Universal Quantum computation. This is this sounds like a Quantum circuit model not something like Quantum annealing. Like I said, I don't fully understand all of this, but I think it's incredibly fascinating that they're a that they're using light which people have talked about for a while issue with light being that It interacts with everything as well. Yeah, it interacts with everything around it making it much harder to keep it from D cohering but the fact that they're saying their source of two-dimensional cluster States can be combined with Quantum error correction to enable fault-tolerant Quantum computation that that could mean that they have a an interesting way that it could be enabled or that could be a general statement of are demonstrated source of two-dimensional cluster States can be combined with Quantum error correction to enable fault-tolerant Quantum computation just like you could do that with a superconducting. Yeah superconducting Quantum bit qubit and even though we don't have that yet. So there's a potentially a little extra hype there. But if nothing else the GIF showing what is It is fantastic and you should absolutely win. This podcast is over go take a look at that. Alright, the next thing is Volkswagen. They have decided to team up with d-wave. I believe. Yes checking my notes. Yeah, they're using a d-wave quantum computer that is supposedly calculating the fastest route for nine participating buses. So they are doing traffic optimization using a quantum computer. I'll read this first little excerpt and then give a bit of a summary and a breakdown of what exactly is going on here why it matters so Volkswagen is launching in libsyn the world's first pilot project for traffic optimization using a quantum computer for this purpose Volkswagen is participating with public transportation provider Karis to equip maaaaan buses with a traffic management system developed in House this system uses a d-wave quantum computer and calculates the fastest route for each of the nine participating buses individually and almost in real time. This way passengers travel times will be significantly reduced even during Peak traffic hours and traffic flow will be improved Volkswagen is testing it system which was developed. Jointly with the software specialist heck sad and PTV group during the web Summit Technology conference in libsyn from November 4 to 8 during the conference buses will carry thousands of passengers. injures through the city traffic and libsyn So what's interesting about this is that it is a major corporation that is taking an interest in Quantum Computing. This is something that we've known Quantum Computing can be good at for quite some time the what is essentially the traveling salesman problem in this case just had what's the fastest route between two points? What's interesting is that they aren't just optimizing the root once you get there. They are also doing Some passenger number prediction, which is I believe that is not the passenger number prediction is not on the quantum Computing side. If I understand this correctly, the passenger number prediction is done using traditional classical means and then once you have that number prediction, they use the quantum computer for the route optimization. It's an interesting concept and I think that it if it's if it's actually happening that it would be a great step forward for Quantum Computing because again any amount of investment into the space from the companies like Volkswagen is necessarily not necessarily but most of the time is a good thing. This can is could be just a publicity stunt. There's not really a way to know whether or not it's it's anything more than that. Do you have quantum computers? We've talked about the difference between Quantum annealing and superconducting qubits in the past or the sort of the yeah, the quantum annealer versus the gate the circuit model and d-wave uses Quantum annealing which means that they have an overhead. Head they can do the universe. They can do Universal Quantum computation, but they have an overhead and It seems to me that this is a this is more of a publicity stunt than anything. That being said. I think it is a very good publicity stunt in that it benefits something other than just publicity Volkswagen is of course getting that publicity as here. I am talking about this whole shindig, but if they are able to show that these nine Says that they're using Quantum computation to calculate the fastest routes have a significant speed up over the other buses or that they're using or even that if they're predicting or calculating the fastest route with other buses if they can show that they are using less power there being more efficient or it's faster to do it on quantum computers versus classical machines, then that would be something that would be fantastic at this point. it sounds like they're just using Quantum machines for the sake of using Quantum machines because those nine buses with in one city and libsyn can most likely that's not something that is showing Quantum Supremacy that is not something that is outside of the realm of what can be done with a high-performance Computing cluster the question then becomes are they using more or less power and is it taking more or less time to prepare the Basis that the quantum based is State and you know control your qubits do the quantum computations read out the qubits versus plugging it into a known classical algorithm that will get you the correct answer that remains to be saying remains to be seen but I think that we're moving in the right direction this it's definitely a hopeful sign. All right. Now what you've all been waiting for Google's paper, which I have already covered in quite a lot of detail. If you go back to my October of 2018 episode you can see that however, they that was me talking about the their most recent. Their most recent archive preprint so not an official one. They have released the official one. It is titled quantity Supremacy using a programmable superconducting processor and it is published in nature. There are some changes but the vast majority of the paper has remained the same it was published online the 23rd of October. So three days after I release that episode which makes me go. Ah, I wish I could have gotten It out, but let me read the abstract to you because it's still claims all of those things. Remember 23rd of October is it was published two days after IBM released their blog post and paper saying that Google you haven't actually reached Quantum Supremacy yet, which we'll talk about in a second here. Here's the abstract. The promise of quantum computers is that certain computational tasks might be rooted explode exponentially faster on a Quantum processor than on a classical processor a fundamental challenge is to build a high fidelity processor capable of running Quantum algorithms in an exponentially large computational space here. We report the use of a processor with programmable superconducting qubits to create Quantum States on 53 qubits corresponding to a computational state space of Dimension to to the 53 about 10 to the 16 measurements from repeated experiments samples. Resulting probability distribution which we verify using classical simulations are Sycamore processor takes about 200 seconds to sample one instance of a Quantum circuit a million times our benchmarks currently indicate that the equivalent task for a state-of-the-art classical supercomputer would take approximately 10,000 years this dramatic increase in speed compared to all known classical algorithms is an experimental realization of quantum Supremacy for this specific computational tasks heralding a much-anticipated. New paradigm now, let me go back. You'll notice our Benchmark this this dramatic increase in speed compared to all known classical algorithms is an experimental realization of quantum Supremacy. So here's the question. Did they not realize what IBM realized and said that there were no known classical algorithms I could do this or did IBM mess up because those two things are mutually exclusive. Of that there's a dramatic increase in speed compared to all known classical algorithms and IBM saying here's a known classical algorithm that does not give you a dramatic increase in speed unless you are defining dramatic increase in speed as 200 seconds versus 10,000 years or so. Sorry rather, you're defining dramatic increase in speed as 200 seconds versus two to three days. Days, then it I would still count that as dramatic increase there are multiple ways to read that and it is not defined explicitly in the slightest. So I encourage you to read through the Google Quantum Supremacy paper. It is fairly readable. If you have some background in Quantum Computing and you're fine with just accepting the fact that some of the words are going to be Greek to you unless you speak Greek and then in which case they will Another language and yeah it is it's a very readable paper. It's very interesting. If you've already read the the preprint you probably don't need to read this one because the changes were minor some things are a bit clearer in this one. I would say for instance their cross-country benchmarking and how they're coming up with the number of 10,000 years is defined a bit more. But other than that, it's approximately typically the same and if you would like a breakdown of the paper go and listen to my episode titled Google's Quantum Supremacy. That's all I have to say on the Google side. Oh actually started there is one more thing in the show notes. There's a link to Google made a YouTube video about their Quantum Supremacy paper and Quantum Supremacy in general. That is an interesting watch. / listen that if you don't want to read through the whole paper that We'll definitely suffice and give you an idea into the sort of the sort of advertising that Google is putting out for this this achievement. But IBM, of course came back on the day after. and said Google you're wrong and this is I find this hilarious because this is the closest thing you'll get to a this is a this is absolutely a nerd fight. And if you think it's I know it's a nerd fight because it takes one to know one IBM released a blog post on their IBM research blog saying on quote. Supremacy so they said on then in scare quotes Quantum Supremacy, which is hilarious and I love it. I will read you a little bit of their blog post and then what has become tradition around here read a bit of what they wrote and then break it down a bit. So here is a blog post of course links in the description. Quantum computers are starting to approach the limit of classical simulation and it is important that we continue to Benchmark progress and to ask how difficult they are to simulate. This is a fascinating scientific question recent advances advances in Quantum Computing have resulted in 253 qubit processors one from our group and IBM and a device described by Google in a paper published in the journal Nature in the paper. It is argued that their device reached Quantum Supremacy and that a quote state-of-the-art supercomputer would require Approximately 10,000 years to perform the equivalent task side note from me. Can you feel the Stark man we argue. Sorry. This is in this is italicized. We argue that an ideal simulation of the same tasks can be performed on a classical system in two point five days. And with far greater Fidelity. This is in fact a conservative worst case scenario and we expect that with additional refinements the The cost of this simulation can be further reduced. Wow. That is that is some snark. I mean, I'm sure that it's all it's not supposed to come across as snarky but that's how I read it because it makes it so much more fun. If you just imagine somebody writing this going. This is in fact a conservative worst-case estimate. Anyhow, What they have said is that what Google is doing is saying okay in order to run this in the best way possible. We need to store the entire state of the system in Ram. We need to have random access memory to the entire state of the quantum system, which is why Which is why this gets so big so fast because the state spaces of a n cubed system is 2 to the N. Excuse me. This is yeah. It's a what IBM has said is what if we didn't have to store it all in Ram. What have we could use let your base? What's essentially your hard drives in order to store parts of this? eight and what that allows them to do is it allows them to store way more and Sorry, this is I am sort of reading the blog post. I should stop that. What yeah, what they're saying is that they can use secondary storage to simulate up to 53 and 54 qubits. And that even they could potentially do more faster than 10,000 years again. They're saying they could do it in two point five days on the Summit supercomputer at Oak Ridge Oak Ridge National Laboratories. However, remember that Google's Google's machine their Quantum machine can do it in two hundred seconds. So it's still a massive speed up, but it's not in the realm of quantum Supremacy where a quantum computer can do something that a classical computer absolutely cannot. What's another thing that's interesting is that they have said sorry, let me find the exact quote. Yeah, they're classical simulation estimate of 10,000 years is based on the observation that the RAM memory requirement just store this full State Vector in a Schrodinger type simulation would be prohibitive and thus one needs resort to a forgetting our fireman simulation that trades off space for time. They are saying that Sorry, yes, here's the quote. However classical computers have resources of their own such as a hierarchy of memories and high-precision computations and Hardware various software Assets in a vast knowledge base of algorithms and it is important to leverage all such capabilities when comparing Quantum to classical so they're saying Ram is great. But if we use something else we can speed it up and make this way easier on ourselves. That's yeah, they're they're paper is titled leveraging secondary storage just simulate deep 54 qubit Sycamore circuits and it is only slightly less readable than Google's paper. There is a link of course to the archive of the paper and it's an it's an interesting read. It's like I said a little less readable mainly because it is On a very technical way of simulating this these circuits. They have a proposed simulation strategy section that goes into that quite a lot talking about how they're slicing up the circuit in order to spread out the computation how sort of like in the Google's paper how they have a lighted circuits and split circuits. Similar to that sort of idea but for simulations instead of running it on an actual machine and then they have how they got all their estimated running times, which is it makes a lot of sense how they get the the top the total time of two point five days. What's interesting. Is that the vast majority of their time looking at the table right now, so their total time is 2 point 5 for 9 days. Sorry, that should that should round to two point five five days on a on the summit supercomputer at Oak Ridge there the amount of time that they spend on disk in out is one point nine days. So over half of their time is spent on disk IO, but they're still able to speed up significantly. To 10,000 years even with the amount of time that it takes you to read from the secondary storage. That's super interesting. Yeah, the sorry the percent the total percent of time is almost 75 percent seventy four point three seven percent. I highly recommend going through and reading this. Oh, yeah. Here's their 5420 cycle 54 qubit Sycamore circuit would take five point eight days and 65% of the total time is spent on disk and out. So again, it's even though the secondary memory slower overall. It gives you a speed up which is something that's something that's interesting in that a lot of times. You wouldn't think of it in general. If you can store everything in memory, sorry in random access memory you do it because it will speed up your program if you Me too. Of course, if you don't need to that doesn't necessarily make sense, but to speed up your program the more that you can store the closer to where you're performing the operations the faster it's going to be in this case. That's not true because you're dealing with such large State spaces and simulations. That's not something I necessarily would have thought of immediately. So in conclusion there I asked in the intro is it put up or shut up time? It has been since October 21st when IBM said not on Google you didn't get Quantum Supremacy and that has been well over two and a half days. So, of course the summit supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, perhaps they don't have access to constantly. However, IBM does have access to some serious computational power that they could use to simulate this in far less than 10,000 years according to them. They have done a lot of work in proving or I should say giving reasons for their estimate of two and a half days for the computations that Google ran. however, why haven't they shown it it seems like Going back to talking about like the the pr and the marketing aspect of this. It seems that it would be a fantastic article headline to say on quote Quantum Supremacy and also Google you definitely didn't get it because here are the results from us running it in two and a half days or even in a week. Maybe it takes them longer than they thought but that seems like it could be worth the publicity stunt in the end. I don't know that it matters all that much. It's still a vast speed up and it shows that there are things that quantum computers can be used for successfully. And give you speed UPS. Oh and show its things that a classical computer cannot at this point. They're talking about using the algorithm that Google ran on the quantum computer for verifiably random numbers, but that relies on the idea that the quantum computer can do it faster than classical computers can which essentially means that you generate a random number using there? Random Sycamore circuit you get the number back and then you can make sure that it came from this quantum computer because it would be impossible for all of the other classical computers to do this which seems sort of like, I don't know. It seems sort of like a cheat to me and it doesn't it's not super useful but it is technically a potential useful application until you have another 53 qubit Sycamore process are out there. So in the end this is it still an amazing achievement Google's quantifies Pharmacy whether it is actually Quantum Supremacy or not is a feat of engineering and physics and computer science and it might not be as impressive as a speed up from 10,000 years to 200 seconds, but it is at the very very least as impressive as a speed up from 2.5 five days to 200 seconds, which is still incredible and there's more to talk about this episode is going to be a long one because Microsoft has announced their Microsoft Azure quantum So they are talking about Microsoft Azure is a cloud Cloud solution from Microsoft. Azure Quantum is cloud-based Quantum Computing. So I will read you a bit of their product overview. Building sorry build Quantum Solutions today tackling the world's toughest challenges requires computational power that exceeds that of today's most powerful computers where classical Computing may take a billion years to address some of these challenging problems Quantum Computing has the power to solve these problems in weeks days or even hours as your Quantum is I do is a diverse set of Quantum Services ranging from pre-built solutions to software and Quantum Hardware providing developers and customers access to some of the most competitive. Quantum offerings on the market and for developers we've created in the open-source Quantum development kit which has all of the tools and resources you need to start learning and building Quantum Solutions today. We talk about the quantum development kit in previous episode about all of the Frameworks their Quantum development kit is one of those Frameworks that was talked about so they have Partnerships Microsoft is they talk about Physical access they are not creating their own qubits as of yet. They are still working on creating topological qubits, which work based on topological insulators. And the that has not been shown to be a viable solution for even creating a single qubit at this point. So they have other industry Partners such as one cubit ion Q Honeywell and qci. And what's interesting about that is that Microsoft is sort of doing the same thing that Amazon is doing which we will get to later with Amazon bra KET. But anyhow, the Azure Quantum stack is essentially everything you could ever need to do Quantum Computing its high level algorithms. Its low-level Hardware access its cloud computing so you don't have to host it on. Premises it's a it's an interesting offering. And again, it's another of those signs that Quantum Computing is moving into the mainstream. They already have customers. They are working with Case Western Reserve University. They're working with Ford working with Wills Towers Watson. They've got big names that have already signed on to be part of Microsoft Azure quantum. now There they have a frequently asked questions that includes what's with the cat Schrodinger's cat as part of their logo and it's a it's an interesting an interesting nod. So yeah, it is open currently for preview. You can become an early adopter and start playing around with Quantum software and Hardware. From someone other than IBM for one of the first times ever it. It's something interesting in that. There are I can see it being viable in the future. There are already software Solutions out there for many many things and yet people still use Microsoft Azure because it makes it more convenient and it makes it easier and they make a they make an analysis A cost-benefit analysis that says the cost of Hosting these things on my own on-site. And going through all of that work may be it may be fiscally less where we're spending less money upfront to sorry less money in the long run to buy them and maintain them ourselves. However, if we let Microsoft do it all that for us and we connect up to the their cloud services that will be less money in the long run because we're wasting less time on figuring during out how to get all of this stuff up and running. I think that is the power of these sort of hosted Solutions where you have Quantum Computing companies that are working on the hardware. They specialize on the hardware and then they sell it to Microsoft and Microsoft sort of resells it to other customers with pretty packaging and nice algorithms and a library that has things like I want to do Grover search algorithm on this array. Get the grover say give it a function Grover search and then give it as a parameter the array that you want to search and it will tell you your answer and that will give you give it back to you in pi over 4 times the square root of n time and allow you to have just a little bit of overhead via Microsoft stuff, but way less overhead via you having to develop those algorithms yourself. It's still going to be useful for companies to develop algorithms. And that's what Microsoft is working on but more specialization where you have people working on just Hardware people working on just software and people working on just applications of this software. I think it's going to be a good thing moving forward. Now that being said let's talk about Amazon jumping into the quantum Computing game with Amazon bracket bracket. I'm still unsure of how to pronounce that because I've never heard someone pronounce that I've only seen it written. in any case they're they're creating an Amazon web services service that allows people to hear the benefits of Amazon bracket. They can get started quickly experiment with multiple Technologies run hybrid Quantum and classical algorithms and get expert help. They've actually teamed up with Cal Tech for this to design and run this service, which is fantastic Caltech. Kate has the best and the brightest in the world and yeah, not sure where I was going with that but When they say experience with multiple Technologies, they are partnering with gate based and Quantum annealing superconductors. So they have they have I believe Righetti is who they're partnering with? Yes. They have it down here Righetti ion q&d wave so Righetti of course makes superconducting qubits ion, Q makes trapped ion quantum computers and d-wave makes quantum annealing superconducting qubits. So what that allows you to do that gives you way more options than saying I can only run gasket on IBM computers, which is no longer true and we'll get to that later. But that is something to be aware of that. There are companies large large companies such as Microsoft and Amazon jumping into the quantum Computing Market not necessarily making their own quantum computers yet Mike. Soft I believe as far as I know it's still working on topological qubits, but they are their packaging quantum computers that other people have made and using their knowledge of creating web services like Azure and AWS in order to make it more accessible for more people to use it and that creates a sort of positive feedback loop where more people use it more people get benefit from it more people can invest more money. e into it which means that they can create more services like this, which means that more people can use it which means more people can and so on and so forth and I think that that is again a very good sign that we are moving into a world full of quantum Computing for everyone to use not just big companies because at this point it's almost like 1950s where it seemed that no, Never use no one would ever have a personal computer inside of your house computers take up full buildings and they require physicists to work on and you've got to have a very specialized degree. And now I have a phone in my pocket that has more power than those huge building sized computers. I think that something like that could happen with Quantum and the more that we have large companies like this like Amazon and Microsoft investing in that. At the closer we get. So like I said kiss get is not just for IBM kiss get 0.13 now supports multiple architectures including trapped ion qubits. So what that means is that they compile it differently. So you write the same kiss get you write your functions with hadamard Gates and your controlled knots and all of that you write that in casket normally and then you select what back-end you want and they will they will find they will find out what back and you want they will use that to inform which house And to compile it so that you can run it on the backend of IBM's Quantum annealing. Sorry not Quantum annealing Quantum gate model superconducting qubits, or you can run it on the trapped ion system and that's super cool because that means that this gate is now even more versatile than has been in the past. That means that more people could potentially use is it in the future and I think that again this goes back to it's all moving towards more people being able to use more Quantum Computing on more devices for more purposes. And in this case more is better. I think that something there's not much to say about this other than it's interesting that if you want to look into the back end of how all this works. That's super interesting. Not something that I want to dive into in a news episode but gasket 0.13 now has support for multiple architectures. You can select whether you want to run on superconducting gate model or trapped ion qubits. All right, we're moving along here. Speaking of big people big companies jumping in to Quantum Computing Intel has been working on Quantum Computing for a while. However, they've been kind of quiet about it. They have now introduced horse Ridge saying that they want to enable commercially viable quantum computers. So horse Ridge is not a quantum computer. It is not a Computing chip. It is a cryogenic control chip. So it's not it does not allow you to sorry. It does not have the cube itself. It allows for control of multiple qubits, and it's a clear path towards scaling larger systems. What they say about why it matters in the race to realize the power and potential of quantum computers researchers have focused extensively on Cubit fabrication building test chips that demonstrate the exponential power of a small number of qubits operating in superposition. However, in early Quantum Hardware developments including design testing and characterization of Intel silicon Spin qubit and superconducting qubit systems until identified a major bottleneck toward realizing commercial scale Quantum computing. Max and control Electronics with horse Ridge Intel introduces An Elegant solution that will enable the company to control multiple qubits and set a clear path toward scaling future systems to larger cubic counts a major Milestone on the path to Quantum practicality. So this is something that they worked on in house and now they're sort of showing it off to the public the Horse Ridge is interesting in that. They are they're thinking ahead to the Future. They are not just saying. Okay, how many qubits can be crammed onto a chip right now, they're saying hold on. We want to cram were cubits onto a chip right now, but also five years down the road. How can we do that? So that it is scalable so we can cram more and more qubits onto a chip there looking ahead. Not just at For instance going back to the example of 1950s Quantum Computing. They are they're not just looking at how many transistors can I solder onto a chip? They're looking at. How can I make it so that I can easily control all of these different transistors so that they can work together to create something more than the sum of the parts. So there's a link of course in the show Notes, too. Tells Newsroom announcement of horse Ridge they talk about down below all of the interesting more technical details about this what's in so my home state Oregon has horse rage is one of the coldest places in Oregon and Intel's Intel's Hillsboro campus is what is working on Quantum computing. We are so sorry these quantum computers and so they named it after horse raging, Oregon. That's that's pretty cool puts a smile on my face. I think the big takeaway there is again, two things one another another big company moving into Quantum Computing investing more money into Quantum Computing betting that it is going to pay off at some point in the future because I I would be extremely surprised if they said that horse Ridge is currently commercially viable and making them money. And the other thing is that they are they're expanding not just now but they are looking forward into the future thinking about how can we scale this because this is not they don't view this as a passing fad. Some people have said the Computing is a passing fad will find new and better Quantum algorithms for classical algorithms to do all the things that quantum computers can do faster, but these companies obviously don't think that and that is certainly hopeful for the future of quantum Computing. All right. I got one last thing which is pretty recently IBM announced that they have reached Quantum volume 32. With their real a Quantum machine. So Quantum volume. What is quantum volume Quantum volume is a measurement system that IBM created because you can't compare direct cubic counts. If you compare direct cubic counts, you have d-wave with their mm Quantum. They've got their 2,000 cubic machine. You're comparing that to IBM's 28 qubit machine Raleigh. And you go hold on why in the world does anybody even try with IBM if d-wave exists the reason there is because they have two different architectures and they have different amounts of qubit interconnect and they have different amounts of D coherence and all of those things. There are many many factors that go into Quantum volume and that is what determines sort of how good a computer is overall. Would be like if you took a your classical machine at home and you made a single number that talked about everything from processor speed to amount of ram to amount of secondary storage and your hard drive and you can find all that together and you got a single number that weighted each of those things a little bit differently. That's sort of what Quantum Quantum volume. Is to Quantum Computing so there they have now reached a Quantum volume of 32, which so starting in 2017. They had Tenerife and then Tokyo and then you hand is berg and now Raleigh they Have now said Raleigh has reached a Quantum volume of 32, which is double Johannesburg from last year in 2019. They are saying that they have yeah that they have they have shown, you know, this this idea that Moore's law can live on, you know, a thousand Generations live in you now Moore's law can live on in Quantum computing. Can double Quantum volume every year so far? They've been doing that? They have they've doubled their Quantum volume from these last two years and if they can continue that into the future then Quantum Computing will become commercially and just practically viable faster than I think anyone would anyone is predicting right now. Well, maybe not anyone. There are some people who are predicting some crazy things but in general, What most people are predicting so again, I'm not going to talk too much about Rowley and there are 28 Q bit with Quantum volume of 32. But suffice it to say it is 28 qubits is not a small amount, you know, it's about half of what Google had on their bristle cone chip or sorry their Sycamore chip, but it Is it a step in the right direction and it is sorry. It's cool that it's that they have a 28 qubit chip and that they can produce more than one of them believe that they have plans for multiple 28 qubit chips the they're just focusing on Raleigh because it has demonstrated Quantum volume 32 and what this means is that it has gotten better faster stronger and as that continues into the future you're going to see more and more ability to use quantum computers. Lee so they have a whole section about looking into the decade ahead. This is what they have predicted for the 2020s. The next 10 years will be the decade of quantum systems and the emergence of a real Hardware ecosystem that will provide the foundation for improving coherence Gates stability cryogenics components integration and packaging only with a systems development mindset. Will we as a community see Quantum advantage in the 2020s? I think that I think that they're they're onto something there with a system development mindset. You can't just focus on one part of a quantum computer, which is why I like Quantum volume at least the concept of creating a number that is fairly easy to look at if not to understand where exactly it comes from, but you can look at a single number and see what progress are we making over time and that number incorporates a system developments mindset in that you have to work on Cuba. Connect and D coherence times and Fidelity and everything from you know, how fast can you control qubits to all of those things in order to improve your Quantum volume? I think that hopefully Quantum volume continues to increase at that exponential rate doubling every year which is better than Moore's law. Did Moore's Law it doubles every two years and I think that If that continues we will reach the point where Quantum Computing is maybe not ubiquitous. But more common than is right. Now where we're able to use it to solve real-world problems. We're solving traffic in a city won't just be a publicity stunt but rather something that is done on a regular basis with a quantum computer so that we can reduce the amount that people have to drive the amount of time stuck in traffic. Affic the amount of pollution put out into the atmosphere by all of these cars and as Quantum Computing becomes more mainstream, we're able to solve even more problems like that. That is my hope for the 2020s and I think that that is an excellent goal and an excellent way to end this segment of the podcast. All right. We actually have some listener Corrections this time finally. So I asked if I had missed any Frameworks in the last episodes discussion of them turns out the people at Xanadu a I have a fan in a mirror Abba's as she pointed out that I missed their Frameworks Penny Lane and Strawberry Fields. So to remedy this a bit I'll do a breakdown of Strawberry Fields or right now from the honestly gorgeous website for Penny Lane. Penny Lane is quote a cross-platform python library for Quantum machine learning. Automatic differentiation and optimization of hybrid clock Quantum classical computations Strawberry Fields on the other hand is quote a full stack python library for Designing simulating and optimizing continuous variable Quantum Optical circuits first, let's define the difference between Penny Lane and Strawberry Fields. Both of which are open source libraries from Xanadu AI Strawberry Fields is the base level language for Xanadu a eyes machines sort of like Kiss get for IBM or a Like well for wregget Righetti Penny Lane is a rapper or library that goes on top of that and allows for very nice interface with the quantum Hardware. Penny Lane is specifically focused on Quantum machine learning, which is pretty cool. But it's not a super General super General topic or application for them to be using it on and I actually got so that's that's that for strawberry fields and Penny Lane that I actually got a lot of feedback. Around this episode Arthur PESA replied to me on Twitter in order to bring you out to my attention. He said to do fast simulations for instance for a variational algorithms where you need to run the circuit many times. Yeah. I was the best. Here's the blurb for yeah. Ow. Yeah. Ow is an open source framework that aims to empower Quantum information research with software tools. It is quantum software 2.0 and Quantum computation education. We are in an early release beta expect some adventures and rough edges. So that reminds me of Google's search which says expect breaking changes, but unlike all the other mentioned libraries packages and Frameworks cow is a framework built in and for the Julia language, that's part of I can claim to be the fastest framework out there. And if you look at they have I have got a link in the show notes to this. They've got a comparison from yellow to other platforms like Kiss kit. Pike well that sort of stuff and yeah is consistently one of if not the fastest simulators out there, so Now this one isn't a correction from a listener but something I wanted to share because the interface is very pleasing in. My opinion qtek has a key their Quantum Inspire SDK online which again Link in the show notes, but it's just gorgeous and in my opinion very well-designed shout out to the people at qtek for making something that is so visually appealing as well as it appears to be actually useful you can It to actually program quantum computers at the very least simulate and learn about quantum computers and finally links in the show notes to lists of quantum Computing Frameworks languages and simulators from quantity dot org and the quantum open-source Foundation AKQ OSF. Now these apparently I just missed as I was looking up Quantum Computing Frameworks and languages and simulators, but there are these are More complete than any podcast I could ever make I suppose I could just read off those lists, which would then make my podcasts just as complete as they are in any case there are a lot in there if you want to go back and listen to my episode on Frameworks, which is the previous episode. Please do so that gives you a good overview of some of the most common Frameworks and languages, but if you want a just a full list of all of the ones out there check out those links for Quantico. And cue OSF. I got an interesting question on Twitter from agent Anakin a i who asked if there is such a thing as distributed Quantum Computing. This is something I had never heard of and my first reaction was it doesn't really make sense because the whole point of quantum Computing is that you have this dense interconnect between the qubits allowing you to have such a greater State space where you can perform calculations. However, I thought I I should look into it a bit. What I found was surprising in that distributed Quantum Computing is a theoretical possibility and that there has been a paper published about it according to physicist org a network of small quantum computers can Implement any Quantum algorithm with just a small overhead when they say small overhead. They really mean it looking at the paper. Their overhead is O of square root of n Polly. It's hard times poly log in. So that's a fantastic overhead. That's very very small. And if you're able to combine multiple quantum computers into or multiple Quantum processors into that that overhead could be worth it for the ease of making multiple chips that have a lesser interconnect and thus smaller chance that errors in the qubits will propagate there's a link in the show notes as always to fit to the phys.org article as well. As the PDF of their paper that outlines in more detail exactly how this could work. Please reach out to me on Twitter at one Ethan Hanson. I know this was a long episode with some rambling and it was light on technical details. Let me know what I can do better or different so that I can make these changes for season 2, please also reach out if you found a mistake in the podcast so I can make a correction update in the next episode that's always helpful or just reach out to tell me how much you like the podcast because that always puts a smile on my face Quantum Computing now is produced in partnership with the quantum daily.com the quantum daily. The aims to cut through the technical jargon and overhyped fluff pieces to deliver quality comprehendible content about Quantum Computing. If you enjoy this podcast and would also like text resources. Be sure to check out the quantum daily.com, which I have linked to in the show notes. Thank you so much for sticking with me through this whole long episode and I'll have another episode out when I get to it.
Can you even call it "news" if it's 3 months old? Maybe it should be tagged with [olds]   Blanket of light  https://science.sciencemag.org/content/366/6463/369  https://phys.org/news/2019-10-blanket-quantum.html   Volkswagen  https://www.volkswagen-newsroom.com/en/press-releases/volkswagen-optimizes-traffic-flow-with-quantum-computers-5507    Google’s Paper:  https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-019-1666-5  https://youtu.be/FklMpRiTeTA    IBM’s response:  https://arxiv.org/abs/1910.09534v2  https://www.ibm.com/blogs/research/2019/10/on-quantum-supremacy/    Microsoft Azure Quantum  https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/quantum/    Qiskit 0.13 has support for trapped ion qubits  https://www.ibm.com/blogs/research/2019/11/qiskit-for-multiple-architectures/    Horse Ridge  https://newsroom.intel.com/news/intel-introduces-horse-ridge-enable-commercially-viable-quantum-computers/#gs.s23jo0    Amazon Braket  https://aws.amazon.com/braket/    IBM Quantum Volume 32 w/ Raleigh  https://www.ibm.com/blogs/research/2020/01/quantum-volume-32/    PennyLane and Strawberry Fields  https://pennylane.ai/  https://strawberryfields.readthedocs.io/en/stable/    Yao  http://docs.yaoquantum.org/stable/  https://github.com/QuantumBFS/Yao.jl/blob/master/docs/src/benchmarks.md    Quantum Inspire  https://www.quantum-inspire.com/    Quantum Frameworks lists  https://quantiki.org/wiki/list-qc-simulators  https://qosf.org/project_list/    Distributed Quantum Computing  https://phys.org/news/2013-02-efficient-quantum.html  https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/pdf/10.1098/rspa.2012.0686    The Quantum Daily  https://thequantumdaily.com/    ---   Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/quantumcomputingnow/message 