Yale Professors Race Google and IBM to the First Quantum Computer

["Dave Farber" <farber () gmail com>]

> Begin forwarded message:
>
> From: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne () warpspeed com>
> Subject: [Dewayne-Net] Yale Professors Race Google and IBM to the First Quantum Computer
> Date: January 15, 2018 at 4:13:54 AM EST
> To: Multiple recipients of Dewayne-Net <dewayne-net () warpspeed com>
> Reply-To: dewayne-net () warpspeed com
>
> [Note:  This item comes from friend Shannon McElyea.  DLH]
>
> Yale Professors Race Google and IBM to the First Quantum Computer
> By CADE METZ
> Nov 13 2017
> <https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/13/technology/quantum-computing-research.html>
>
> SAN FRANCISCO — Robert Schoelkopf is at the forefront of a worldwide effort to build the world’s first quantum 
> computer. Such a machine, if it can be built, would use the seemingly magical principles of quantum mechanics to 
> solve problems today’s computers never could.
>
> Three giants of the tech world — Google, IBM, and Intel — are using a method pioneered by Mr. Schoelkopf, a Yale 
> University professor, and a handful of other physicists as they race to build a machine that could significantly 
> accelerate everything from drug discovery to artificial intelligence. So does a Silicon Valley start-up called 
> Rigetti Computing. And though it has remained under the radar until now, those four quantum projects have another 
> notable competitor: Robert Schoelkopf.
>
> After their research helped fuel the work of so many others, Mr. Schoelkopf and two other Yale professors have 
> started their own quantum computing company, Quantum Circuits.
>
> Based just down the road from Yale in New Haven, Conn., and backed by $18 million in funding from the venture capital 
> firm Sequoia Capital and others, the start-up is another sign that quantum computing — for decades a distant dream of 
> the world’s computer scientists — is edging closer to reality.
>
> “In the last few years, it has become apparent to us and others around the world that we know enough about this that 
> we can build a working system,” Mr. Schoelkopf said. “This is a technology that we can begin to commercialize.”
>
> Quantum computing systems are difficult to understand because they do not behave like the everyday world we live in. 
> But this counterintuitive behavior is what allows them to perform calculations at rate that would not be possible on 
> a typical computer.
>
> Today’s computers store information as “bits,” with each transistor holding either a 1 or a 0. But thanks to 
> something called the superposition principle — behavior exhibited by subatomic particles like electrons and photons, 
> the fundamental particles of light — a quantum bit, or “qubit,” can store a 1 and a 0 at the same time. This means 
> two qubits can hold four values at once. As you expand the number of qubits, the machine becomes exponentially more 
> powerful.
>
> Todd Holmdahl, who oversees the quantum project at Microsoft, said he envisioned a quantum computer as something that 
> could instantly find its way through a maze. “A typical computer will try one path and get blocked and then try 
> another and another and another,” he said. “A quantum computer can try all paths at the same time.”
>
> The trouble is that storing information in a quantum system for more than a short amount of time is very difficult, 
> and this short “coherence time” leads to errors in calculations. But over the past two decades, Mr. Schoelkopf and 
> other physicists have worked to solve this problem using what are called superconducting circuits. They have built 
> qubits from materials that exhibit quantum properties when cooled to extremely low temperatures.
>
> With this technique, they have shown that, every three years or so, they can improve coherence times by a factor of 
> 10. This is known as Schoelkopf’s Law, a playful ode to Moore’s Law, the rule that says the number of transistors on 
> computer chips will double every two years.
>
> [snip]
>
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