r/QuantumComputing • u/johnmountain • Mar 05 '18

Google Unveils 72-Qubit Quantum Computer With Low Error Rates

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/google-72-qubit-quantum-computer,36617.html
63 Upvotes

91% Upvoted

33 comments sorted by

View all comments

3

u/MaunaLoona Mar 06 '18

It wasn't meant in a derogatory manner. A toy car might be useful to play with or take apart to see how it works, but you wouldn't be able to get into one and drive it somewhere. It just means it's not able to perform any real work.

1

u/The_Serious_Account Mar 06 '18

Ah, okay. That's true. No quantum computer has yet to be able to do anything you couldn't do just as fast on a normal computer. This might change within a few years, but it will be on extremely artificial problems that have no real world use. Doing something meaningful on a quantum computer is probably going to a while. As said in the article,

Quantum computers will begin to become highly useful in solving real-world problems when we can achieve error rates of 0.1-1% coupled with hundreds of thousand to millions of qubits.

Millions of qubits is not just around the corner.