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Comment by drawqrtz | Hacker News Reader

What use has a SDK for developing on an imaginary hardware. But seriously how do you even test it?

There is hardware, it isn't imaginary. It just isn't very robust or extensive yet.

There is hardware which purportedly does a quantum computation, but it's completely useless even as a proof of concept, unless you have a burning need to randomly sample from the distribution it happens to generate.

An interesting idea is simulating quantum math on real hardware. It's an open question if quantum computing is equivalent to contemporary computing. It seems likely that it is.

> but it's completely useless even as a proof of concept

We might have different definitions of "proof of concept", but I think that's exactly what it was (if you're referring to Google's experiment).

This FAQ explains this quite nicely:

https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=4317

IBM has early stage hardware that can be used for toy-ish proof of concept work. because the hardware is still very noisy and not error corrected, it cannot be used for more than extremely simple problems. also, access to anything but the simplest hardware systems is hard to get and expensive. so people who want to do research on quantum computing mostly use simulators. qiskit does both simulation as well as provide actual hardware access to IBMs hardware.

> What use has a SDK for developing on an imaginary hardware.

Learning and research, to name two.

> But seriously how do you even test it?

Emulators.

It's a simulation suite as far as I can tell.

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