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Re:Google Engineers Think This 72-Qubit Processor Can Achiev... by Zaak on Thursday March 08, 2018 @11:16AM (#16545261)
That would be fun to watch, but to be overly pedantic about it, it will take a computer with hundreds of qubits to break current public key encryption.
Re:Google Engineers Think This 72-Qubit Processor Can Achiev... by vtomole on Thursday March 08, 2018 @11:40AM (#16545490)
It will take hundreds of fault tolerant qubits. That means it will take potentially millions of physical qubits of relatively high quality. There is a long road ahead from 72 relatively medium quality to millions of relatively high quality qubits.
Re:Google Engineers Think This 72-Qubit Processor Can Achiev... by ByThyGrace on Thursday March 08, 2018 @12:28PM (#16545941)
As a layman, I've never heard of qubit quality. What is it exactly? How do you determine it? And why does it affect computation?
Re:Google Engineers Think This 72-Qubit Processor Can Achiev... by vtomole on Thursday March 08, 2018 @01:33PM (#16546457)
Qubit quality is defined by the quantum volume [0]. Errors that occur when gates are applied to qubits need to be below a certain threshold to perform error correction.

[0]: https://www.research.ibm.com/ibm-q/resources/quantum-volume....

Re:Google Engineers Think This 72-Qubit Processor Can Achiev... by Zaak on Friday March 09, 2018 @11:21AM (#16552786)
Is quantum error correction really that demanding? I thought it was only a small multiple of the number of qubits, not orders of magnitude more.
Re:Google Engineers Think This 72-Qubit Processor Can Achiev... by tchow on Thursday March 08, 2018 @11:30AM (#16545395)
How many hundreds? We are apparently at 72 qubits...sounds to me we are a year or two away from what you're saying
Re:Google Engineers Think This 72-Qubit Processor Can Achiev... by obmelvin on Thursday March 08, 2018 @12:23PM (#16545897)
As your sibling comment pointed out, we still have a long way to go before we are able to make large amounts of stable and thus truly usable qubits.