Honeywell, the US-based conglomerate made an official announcement that has got the lead in the race to make the world’s fastest quantum computer. Twice more powerful as the existing computers operated by IBM and Google, their unveiled machine has achieved a high score – quantum volume of 64.
Crux of the Matter
Quantum Volume And It’s Quantum Bit Qubit or quantum bit is the sub-atomic unit of measurement of quantum information, that can store more information than its counterparts, basic computer bits. Quantum volume is a measurement that takes into account the number of qubits of a machine along with the error rate, thereby expressing its effectiveness. Example – IBM’s Raleigh had achieved a quantum volume of 32, at the starting of this year – Honeywell aims to achieve double this volume.
What Can Quantum Computers Do? Quantum computers follow the rules of quantum physics i.e they aren’t limited to performing a single calculation at a time and can work on multiple calculations simultaneously. This makes them far more capable than classical computers and more energy-efficient than supercomputers. However, due to their complex nature, they are still in the early stages of usage and research.
Quantum computer model in IBM Research Lab
What’s Honeywell’s Beast Made Of?
This is a result of the combination of using identical, fully connected qubits and precision control Tony Uttley, President of Honeywell Quantum Solutions
The machine is located in a 1,500-square-foot storage facility in Colorado, US. The highly secure facility consists of a basketball-sized stainless steel chamber that is cooled by liquid helium at a temperature above absolute zero, the point at which atoms stop vibrating. Then individual atoms floating above a computer chip are targeted with lasers to perform calculations in that huge chamber.
Honeywell declared that it has the world's highest-performing quantum computer. Touting a quantum volume of 64—the metric used to convey the effectiveness of a quantum computer, the device is twice as powerful as IBM's supercomputer, which was the former industry leader. pic.twitter.com/k7mNl9RgJq — Time Screen (@TimeScreen1) June 22, 2020
Glimpses of Quantum Leaps 1981– Nobel-prize winner, physicist Richard Feynman, coins the term quantum computer, at Caltech University. 1985 – Physicist David Deutsch, maps out how a quantum computer would operate via a blueprint generated at Oxford. 1994 – Mathematician Peter Shor, writes an algorithm that has the potential to tap a quantum computer’s power, at Bell Labs 2007 – Startup D-Wave, announces a quantum computing chip that can solve Sudoku puzzles.
D-wave’s machines using the quantum chip
2013 – Google partners up with NASA to fund a lab, in order to try D-Wave’s hardware. 2014 – Google starts doing rigorous research in its new quantum hardware lab. 2016 – IBM makes code for its prototype quantum processors open-source, for anyone to experiment with. 2017 – Startup Rigetti opens its own quantum computer facility, to build prototype hardware. 2019 – Google’s quantum computer completed a complex computation in 200 seconds.
Google’s very own Quantum computer
Curiopedia
The CDC 6600 was the flagship of the 6000 series of mainframe computer systems manufactured by Control Data Corporation. Generally considered to be the first successful supercomputer, it outperformed the industry’s prior record holder, the IBM 7030 Stretch, by a factor of three.
Deep Blue versus Garry Kasparov was a pair of six-game chess matches between world chess champion Garry Kasparov and an IBM supercomputer called Deep Blue. Kasparov won the first match in 1996 but the 1997 match was the first defeat of a reigning world chess champion by a computer under tournament conditions.
Alan Turing was an English mathematician, computer scientist, logician, cryptanalyst, philosopher, and theoretical biologist. His mathematical model, Turing machine, is a model of computation that defines an abstract machine. Turing is widely considered to be the father of theoretical computer science and artificial intelligence.
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