Not quite. The point is the qubit also holds the information of all operations applied up until the point the sequence is completed. The limit on that is the time to decoherence, not the number of qubits (although the more you have the harder it gets to stay coherent).

That does mean that the result you get from the calculation can be nothing more than the classical equivalent, but the amount of inputs to that result, and the resultant enormous explosion of processing you can do on it (each operation yielding potentially exponential growth in evaluated possibilities), is dependent on other factors.

Ok, thank you.

I was thinking of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hidden_variable_theory and that those could be properties of particles skewed into extra dimensions.

This is way over my math and physics skill, but it's still very fascinating.

According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bells_theorem Hidden variable theories don't make sense.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bells_Theorem works http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bells_theorem does not.

Anyway, that's not quite true, you can get there by giving up principle of locality or counterfactual definiteness. And in theory nothing requires the principle of locality to be true.

The original IBM press release says "a single 250-qubit state contains more bits of information than there are atoms in the universe." Then the author tries to rewrite the press release but in this case what probably seem like small changes to him like "contains" to "stores" turn the sentence from being an essentially correct simplification to being utterly wrong. Maybe blatant press release rewrites are necessary evil in science journalism but its depressing to me that most publications don't even bother with a fact check.

that's why I like Hacker News