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IBM Quantum System Two

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101 pointsmtillman71 comments

I watched some of the presentations at their recent quantum summit. They have smart people building sophisticated systems, but they struggled to define meaningful use cases for quantum computing.

I've noticed a "tell" for when product launches will likely fail. If the presenter cannot create a strong argument for the product, but instead tells the audience some version of, "we're excited to see what use cases you create for our product," then the product is likely to fail. IBM did this several times at the Quantum summit. It's basically saying, "Here's a thing. Hopefully you can find something useful to do with it, because we can't. But here are our hardware specs."

I'll pay more attention when IBM and other quantum players start to talk about applications more than numbers of qubits.

LASERs had the same problem when they were first invented. It took serious cost reductions before they became practical outside of laboratory environments. Now they are everywhere. I think Quantum computing is currently in the same place. The systems just aren't practical yet, but if they survive and iterate a few more times it could be revolutionary.

Revolutionise what?

Sure, we can hand-wave away that it'll revolutionise *something*, but there's no direct candidate on the horizon. As of today, at best we can hope that more accurate quantum simulations could lead to some breakthrough tech, but that's a very indirect revolution at best.

With LASER, at least, there was a bunch of known use-cases that were blocked by the availability of the tech. There are no such equivalents here.

If you build it, they will come...

Most of the time, technology that is leading edge is only there for a short period, as its either bought out or lacks funding. With IBM, they have the funds to start revolutions, and have a larger vision at play. However, quantum computing is not a widely accepted concept due to a lot of its complexities, which is likely why its such a niche area. Given time and money, which IBM can handle, something will happen.

The Quantum Algorithm Zoo website[0] gives some examples of problems where the quantum algorithm is much faster than the classical one.

My own view is that for a lot of (but not all[1]) problems for which we have a quantum algorithm improvement, we maybe already have a heuristic that gets us 95% of the way there just as quickly. So the application of a QC on these problems is buying us a massive speedup, but only if you need to get the perfect, optimal answer. And sometimes you do!

[0]https://quantumalgorithmzoo.org/

[1]Factoring large primes is a good counter example.

An issue highlighted there is that there are very few algorithms where you have an exponential advantage vs classical hardware

I mean, even just going from n2 to n1.5 is huge.

It's nice if you can do it in software, but this necessarily requires hardware. Any algorithm can be sped up by a constant factor with specialized hardware: for example, addition is 2n if you need to perform an addition with an optional carry for each digit. With specialized hardware, 64-bit numbers can be added in one operation, which makes the algorithm n/32.

This kind of improvement is nice, but it would mean that quantum computers are no moe exciting than video cards.

Edit: This is a result of the linear speedup theorem. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_speedup_theorem

I don't know if this sort of analogy illuminates, seems rather it hides.

If we assume quantum computing is the same as SIMD, yeah, I wouldn't be excited either.

What I mean is that I would consider quantum computing a failure if it took us "from n2 to n1.5". That would make it the same as SIMD or parallel computing. I still think that linear-time factoring or sorting could be revolutionary, but only if enough interesting problems can be reduced to them. I'm holding out hope for a fast quantum SAT3 solver, at that point it will just be a waiting game until you can get an expansion card for solving NP-hard problems.

> no more exciting than video cards

Um... That seems like a pretty high bar to me, actually. Are you forgetting about how much they've done to speed up the training of quite a lot of deep-learning models? And really the only competition is TPUs and other dedicated chips that, at the end of the day, are also just chips optimized for matrix operations. The graphics in state of the art video games? Were I fan of crypto, mining rigs? That's some pretty impactful tech right there.

Yes, but... we already have that. If quantum computing only provides a linear speedup, that can already be done with a conventional ASIC. I don't think it's a high bar for quantum computing to provide something that is not already commonly available. The real boon comes from at least quadratic runtime improvements.

To be clear, I'm not saying that linear speedup is an innovation comparable to the video card, I'm saying it _is_ a glorified video card or ASIC.

I think there's a formatting miscommunication here. The person you're replying to meant going from n^2 -> n^1.5, which isn't just a linear speedup.

E.g. processing 1000 elements with an n^2 algorithm requires a million operations, with n^1.5 only ~31.5k. Processing a million elements goes from a trillion ops to a billion, a 1000x improvement.

Ha! That explains a lot, I hadn't even considered it. Yes, a change like that would be massive, and I've just been fighting a guy I made up.

That's not true. GPUs give a speedup of O(1) (which is the smallest of Amdahl's law's maximum and the GPU number of SIMD lanes). Going from n2 to n1.5 is not a linear speedup, it's a polynomial speedup.

I agree with you, but I was misled by the formatting of your comment. I thought you were saying 2×n -> 1.5×n, but now I see you mean n^2 -> n^1.5.

Sorry for taking this unfortunate shortcut!

while BQP vs P is all nice and good, afaik, the scaling just isn't there yet on the hardware. one, the noise is too high, two the bits are too low, and apparently we don't have error correction whatsoever.

i remember that even the 'factoring of 15' on a quantum computer uses some special hacks (that needs the answer) to code it in.

Aside from the much-touted uses in cryptography, probably the biggest use will be as universal quantum simulators. A lot of quantum simulations are infeasible beyond trivial interactions, because the classical memory and number of computations required to capture and progress the state of the quantum system grows exponentially with each interacting element in the system. Simplifying exponentially increasing memory/computation time requirements to linearly increasing qubit/simulation time requirements will make a lot of chemistry and material science way easier.

I thought cryptography was the big thing here. Whoever has a big enough one of these could break tls and other encryption. Which means we enter an arms race where we need quantum to build qc-proof encryption before qc gets cheap and easy enough for the bad guys.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/post-quantu...

Not really - you don't need QCs to do encryption that (as far as we know right now at least) is just as infeasible to break on QCs as it is on classical computers.

For example, most symmetric key algorithms are already QC-safe; in particular, AES would still be safe even in a world where you could build a QC with as many gates as a modern chip.

Of course, there is an asterisk here, as the set of all problems for which QCs give exponential/super-polynomial speedups over known classical algorithms is not yet known (not even at the level where we have some confidence that P != NP). Everything I'm claiming is based on currently known quantum algorithms, and on belief about the properties of QCs in general (i.e. that they can only solve more efficiently problems that display certain rare characteristics).

The first laser device was demonstrated in 1960. By 1961, patents on lasers already indicated applications in communication and meteorology[1]. Subsequent patents included uses for range finding, chemical analysis of gases, drilling, and other uses.

Amateur's were constructing working lasers in their basements within a year or two after the laser was invented.

I grew up reading a monthly column in Scientific American titled The Amateur Scientist which in the 1960's described a number of laser projects that could be constructed by amateurs. 1964[2], 1965[3], 1967[4], 1969[5], 1970[6]. Naturally, projects using lasers were discussed in other books and magazines during this time as well.

To me, Quantum computing seems very different than the history of lasers.

[1] https://patents.google.com/patent/US3353115A/en

[2] Scientific American, THE AMATEUR SCIENTIST, Vol. 211, No. 3 (September 1964), pp. 227-242 (16 pages)

[3] Scientific American, THE AMATEUR SCIENTIST, Vol. 213, No. 6 (December 1965), pp. 106-113 (8 pages)

[4] Scientific American, THE AMATEUR SCIENTIST, Vol. 216, No. 2 (February 1967), pp. 122-134 (13 pages)

[5] Scientific American, THE AMATEUR SCIENTIST, Vol. 220, No. 2 (February 1969), pp. 118-125 (8 pages)

[6] Scientific American, THE AMATEUR SCIENTIST, Vol. 222, No. 2 (February 1970), pp. 116-121 (6 pages)

I'm not a laser expert, but they seem reasonably similar and dissimilar on the surface. Lasers were first theorized in 1917, which is 43 years between theory and first demonstration. Quantum computing theory seems to date to 1980, also exactly 43 years ago from today (a neat coincidence!). In the meanwhile, plenty of applications of quantum computing have been proposed.

The main difference seems to be the gap between a demonstration prototype and a useful prototype, where a useful laser followed soon after a first demonstration, whereas a useful quantum computer requires many more qubits than a simple demonstration device.

I think there is also a bit of an unfair uphill battle that quantum computers have. They have to outcompete existing computers, which is a technology that perhaps has had more investment and refinement than any other human technology, so the bar to clear is high and may take longer. Or, maybe quantum computers will never reach that bar!

I think the battle to promote the use of quantum computers is rendered even more difficult by the fact that their raison d'être of "being faster than classical computers" requires one to further develop the existing field of complexity analysis for classical computers. Indeed, it's difficult to fairly compare the gate/oracle-based complexity of quantum computers to the iterations/multiplications/etc-based complexity of classical computers, especially if we don't know their complexity in the first place [1]!

[1] - Recently, there has been interest in the complexity analysis of deep learning NNs: https://arxiv.org/abs/1811.03962

Further Reading:

* Church-Turing Thesis for quantum computers - https://quantumcomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/6088/wh...

* Quantum Turing Machine - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_Turing_machine

My favorite are the press releases from companies that say they need a quantum computer to do logistics and routing. I'm still waiting to see one of the solutions the QC came up with that couldn't have been produced by a modern constraint solver or heuristic router for 1/100th the cost and time.

I would imagine that any logistical problem looking to use so-called "ant routing" might benefit substantially from QC. Similarly for Monte-Carlo type problems.

There is a slight of hand that goes on. The QC solutions are touted in comparison to the challenge of generating an optimal/exact solution. In reality there are many heuristic algorithms that generate solutions that are with 1% of the optimum 99% of the time (choose your numbers - could be 0.1/99.9) It's also important to realise that the process of reading the solution out of a QC is probabilistic, so although the solution might be exact, the noise in the bits you are reading from means that you might have some error there...

It's exciting, people have a job doing it, they are trying to do science... marketing people try and market it as valuable and no one wants to rock the boat as they will be pushed out and the science will stop.

> "we're excited to see what use cases you create for our product,"

The killer feature of the iPhone is making phone calls.

I recently had the opportunity to talk to the head of a company which is trying to build quantum computers. It's very obviously a spin off from a university to provide a way to keep their better Ph. D students employed and researching but not on University payroll (i.e. with the various requirements that entails).

Basically her opinion was they were 10 years at least away from meaningfully getting beyond 4 practical qubits with their technology, and weren't worried about it because everyone reporting more are using hundreds to thousands of qubits to error correct out to get the 60 or so they report using in calculations (their technology value add was that they could do with a lot less error correction).

The overall take away I got was quantum computers aren't "imminent" - they're 30 years away at minimum, probably more. The company exists because it's important basic research, but it's definitely not a "commercial products soon" endeavor - it was basically a way to fund focused research on a particular method.

Couldn't you say the same thing about faster processors? Compute power is generally useful, but it's utility is all about where you have the most computation for the least amount of money, and until you hit that point, it's not very useful. Once they hit that point, it's insanely useful for a plethora of circumstances.

There are plenty of examples that already run on simulators. One example would be QAOA that can be used to solve combinational problems like MQO.

Then there is also research that compares the performance of classical ML algorithms to Quantum Based variants, not only simulated but on real, IBM quantum hardware. Not only does the quantum equivalent outperform it (in pure terms of accuracy, as time to train cannot yet be compared), but also in complexity - iirc ~67k parameters for a NN and 16 for a QNN.

This is not to say that it is all set in stone - its still highly unclear which approach and design is the best for what when it comes to quantum circuits.

There is also a problem that noise suppression and error correction need even bigger quantum computers, so we‘re still a way off.

In the words of a Roche ML/Research presentation, who also already tried QC: They tried it and it didnt offer the expected results due to hardware limitations. But they are still actively pursuing it, because in terms of QC you have to be prepared, as otherwise you might be playing an endless catching up with those who were ready.

Serious question: is there any reason to trust anything IBM does or says isn’t vaporware? In recent memory I am only familiar with failed projects that received copious media praise (eg Watson, BlueMix).

The only project I know of that was genuinely successful is Deep Blue. What successes have they had since then?

There is successful tech in the “tech that does what says on the box” and in “achieves good market fit”.

A lot of their stuff does 1, but not 2.

And their mainframes, underhyped to the extreme, that more or less still run the world.

I didn’t know IBM mainframes run the world? Just curious, care to expand?

Banks run the world, IBM mainframes run the banks.

>IBM mainframes run the banks.

And the airlines, and the logistics companies

That's a bit unfair to the insurance companies. They have a pretty big say in what happens and also run mainframes.

And mainframes run on concrete floors, maybe construction companies run the world by that logic?

Mainframes aren't a big truck, they're a series of concrete floors.

My usual comparison is with cargo airplanes.

This is becoming less true over time.

many of the most core US IT infrastructure projects- government and commercial- depend on IBM 360 assembly code or another IBM system, written decades ago that has been repeatedly scaled to handle the increase in load.

Two I can think of: SABRE and the IRS. See more here: https://www.nextgov.com/cxo-briefing/2016/05/10-oldest-it-sy...

Personally I have a ton of respect for production systems that can be scaled in place for 50 years. But I don't have any interest in learning to run IBM mainframes or code for them- I'm preparing for lots of contract work in 2037.

> And their mainframes, underhyped to the extreme, that more or less still run the world.

More or less, but less and less. Many a bank, airline, etc. has had or has or will have a "digital transformation"/move to cloud/rewrite apps/websites to actually be usable/etc. project to switch away from legacy stuff handicapping them to a more modern leaner tech stack. Mostly because they got shown by newer, leaner competition how it's done (neobanks, low-cost airlines) so finally there is some incentive. And of course the added benefits of commodity hardware (as a Service) being much more easily replaceable and scalable. If you're a big bank/airline, why would you spend billions on mainframes from a single vendor you're beholden to, with all the staffing problems (nobody knows this stuff so hiring is a nightmare), specced for the highest possible load you might get? Instead of throwing it on AWS which "everyone" knows and can scale up/down based on demand. Migrating isn't easy or cheap, but it makes so much sense.

Kinda-Sorta. It depends on what you mean by "success". IBM has been doing a commendable job at managing expectations wrt/ quantum computing. e.g. from this very article:

"The new 433 qubit 'Osprey' processor brings us a step closer to the point where quantum computers will be used to tackle previously unsolvable problems,"

So we can reliably expect them to ship what they are promissing. However, there is still a massive skew between what QC brings to the table vs what the public (and investors) are expecting from it. At the current trend, anything QC-related is effectively guaranteed to qualify as vaporwave due to the public at large being mislead on the subject for so long.

This processor has the potential to run complex quantum computations well beyond the computational capability of any classical computer.

I don't think that manages expectations well, the word "potential" is doing a lot of work.

Was Watson a scam? I mean the jeapordy AI, not all the completely unrelated projects they gave the same name later.

Consider that the Jeopardy stunt was basically a sales pitch saying: "If it can do that for Jeopardy, then just imagine what it can do for you!"

There is definitely an argument to be made that this was an empty promise. Not necessarily enough to call it a "scam", but vaporware...

I don't think it was an outright scam, but its use in medical analysis turned out to be very poor: https://qz.com/2129025/where-did-ibm-go-wrong-with-watson-he...

Definitely over-hyped technology. Probably not a scam though.

In light of the large language models from Vaswani et al., I'm curious if anyone could chime in:

1. Does Watson incorporate any deep learning?

2. If not, why? Were disagreements based in business or theory?

"If IBM Watson can find hidden correlations that help your business, then why can't IBM Watson stem a 3 year sales drop at IBM?" - random Twitter user

Power architecture chips, but that's from a no-need-for-marketing-embellishments classical realm.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power10

for an example that is current

Although I'm not up to date on the most recent industry developments, I'd say to be less concerned about the number of qubits, and more concerned about the gate fidelity and qubit coherence. Certainly, you want a quantum computer that you can actually use [1]! It's also important to distinguish between the adiabatic quantum computing of companies like D-Wave with their many qubits and the gate-based quantum computing of Google, IonQ, IBM, etc. with their fewer qubits.

[1] - https://arxiv.org/abs/2110.03137

Those flagship projects that failed technologically were amazing successes.

> received copious media praise

That's the success criteria.

IBM makes money in lots of ways. The last few decades they've struggled with public perception, and an image of being "has-been". This has hurt their ability to get talent and enter new markets. Having your name next to neat, futuristic tech is a good way to counter that image. Even more so when it's things like Watson and Quantum computing that have real nerds doing actual fawning over the tech.

IBM makes an enormous amount of non-vaporware, you just never hear about it because the licensing situation for most of it is so atrocious and its probably exclusive to their system z (mainframe) architecture. IBM systems is a top tier organization being held back by incredibly restrictive business practices. I'm lucky to have been in positions to see a lot of what they work on, but it's always tough to explain to folks who's most memorable recent exposure to IBM products is likely to be some sort of PR stunt like Watson. I've held out hope for a political change within the organization in favor of the systems folks for a long time, but any success on that front has been pretty limited so far.

Kasparov was disappointed with Deep Blue. After the rematch won by Deep Blue (the first match was won by Kasparov), IBM relocated the machine then disassembled everything.

From the time Intel released their 8008 microprocessor to the launch of the 80x86 series that ushered in the PC revolution, we have seen practical uses of computers. A natural progression of that chip revolution is what we are seeing as the ubiquitous presence of powerful chips (1000x or more powerful than the early microprocessors) in devices like phones, televisions, tablets, laptops etc.,

We made progress from the two qubit Quantum computer in 1998 to 54 qubit computer in 2019 to 127 qubit computer from IBM in 2021 to the 433 qubit IBM osprey announced here.

Where are the practical applications in Quantum Computing when we are seeing a similar kind of scale breakthrough playing out over the last 25 years?

What atoms are they using to entangle to create a qubit? How exactly are they entangling these qubits, and re-entangling them post-measurement? I can't find specifics on the quantum CPU architecture in terms of the actual atoms used for entanglement, and how any of the supposed qubits are re-entangled between measurements.

I think IBM is superconducting

"The quantum computers you interact with in IBM Quantum use a physical type of qubit called a superconducting transmon qubit, which is made from superconducting materials such as niobium and aluminum, patterned on a silicon substrate. Such systems are not natural qubits, but are instead formed by isolating two energy levels out of many to form our approximate qubit."

https://quantum-computing.ibm.com/composer/docs/iqx/guide/th...

My question : how many qbits in a single quantum circuit can be implemented on this machine. The max would be 433 - but I am guessing that in fact the realist is lower than that.

Who has the data?

Can all of the qubits be fully mutually entangled? It is my understanding that the exponential speedup with more qubits requires them all to be entangled.

Surely?

If you can entangle qubits 1 and 2, and qubits 2 and 3, then you can entangle the whole set of them together with a few more operations (definitely polynomial in scaling compared to whole computer operations, maybe linear?). You just need a connected graph between the qubits where you can run pairwise operations on any qubits that share an edge.

Where is a good place (if there is one) to learn about quantum software engineering concepts?

https://qiskit.org/textbook/preface.html

This podcast episode is great as a high-level introduction https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/147-quantum-computing-...

https://quantum.country/

it has built-in spaced repetition cards

Why would they cover up that beautiful machine with an ugly gray box?

Are we post-RSA yet?

If and when it happens, ECC will be broken before RSA, as the latter requires roughly an order of magnitude more qubits for the same classical computing complexity. Given how difficult it seems to be to scale quantum computers, there's likely to be a years-long period between ECC being deemed too risky and RSA remaining viable, at least for some tasks.

This might (depending on the precise numbers) also be an argument for Curve448 over Curve25519, apropos a recent Golang crypto project rejection of Curve448. Notably, upgrading to a stronger curve is much more difficult from a logistics standpoint because you have to explicitly add code for each curve to various libraries, and then roll them out globally. Generic curve libraries never took hold after side-channel attacks became common. Whereas for RSA larger keys are trivial to support, and generally already supported intrinsically by deployed software. Some RSA libraries currently cap out at 8192, 65536, or some such for pragmatic reasons (e.g. limiting computational complexity attacks or static loop unrolling), but by comparison this is much, much easier to remedy.

Of course, larger keys only buy you a little time. But it will be a mad scramble when (and if!) it happens, so that time will be very valuable, and much money will be changing hands.

So what's the maximum number it can factorize?

We would hear about it if it could break the current record of 21...

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