16 qubit Quantum Processor in Vancouver

[Thrilla]

I went to the event today, about 300 people showed up (they thought it was gonna be less than 100 lol). I arrived 5min late and had to sit on the floor for 2 hours... didn't learn much, it's pretty much the company history, vision, you can find the rest on the internet including a video interview with the havard guy.



Some notes:

• It took them 2 days to develop their demo softwares to run on quantum hardware.
• 32 qubit processor in Q1 2008, 512 qubit in Q2 2008, and 1024 qubit in Q3 2008.
• Right now the qubits are connected to its neighbors, they're developing connections to many qubits other than just neighbors to increase performance.
• The sodoku demo took them an afternoon to develop.
• Instead of active error checking, the quantum processor run the calculation a few times and check answers, checking answers is faster that finding errors.
• Current 16 qubit processor is about 100 times slower than digital computers today.
• The processor is soaked in liquid helium then further cooled by a heat pump (from my understanding) to 5mK.
• As of today, quantum processor does not replace digital computer, however, they interact with each other to make more complex applications possible.
• The company thinks Moore's law still to be true.
• Geordie the presenter liked the caffeine molecue, which I needed cuz of 6 hours of sleep for 2 days lol...
• They used Linux KDE desktop to communicate!! Possibly with beryl as well.

Good news, they did a live demo.
Bad news, the processor is in a dewer with liquid helium in Burnaby office.


See for yourself, pic/vid


Structure Search Part 1
Structure Search Part 2
Solving Sodoku