Quantum chips could be cool if...
… Google doesn’t just abandon them like almost every other cool thing they’ve stumbled into. And, of course, assuming they’re even telling the truth.
It measures just 4cm squared but it possesses almost inconceivable speed.
Google has built a computing chip that takes just five minutes to complete tasks that would take 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years for some of the world’s fastest conventional computers to complete.
That’s 10 septillion years, a number that far exceeds the age of our known universe…
Quantum computing – which harnesses the discovery that matter can exist in multiple states at once – is predicted to have the power to carry out far bigger calculations than previously possible and so hasten the creation of nuclear fusion reactors and accelerate the impact of artificial intelligence, notably in medical science…
The best thing in this story was the pointy-head who explained that it so fast because it was, sort of, working simultaneously in multiple universes
.
They've been making a lot of noise in the press about this, but since I'm on holidays I haven't been paying it any attention. My suggestion is to believe it when they start to make some money from it. While what they (and the Graun) say is very likely technically true, you can be fairly certain that the bajillion-times speed up only holds if you happen to want to solve a very specific, very pointless problem that it turns out that quantum computers are good at. For solving actual, every-day computational problems, not so much.
Since no-one is claiming that this thing rings in the death-knell of encryption (and therefore online commerce), you can be sure that it's not even up to the task of routinely cracking crypto keys, and if they could do that they would.
Hahahahah, we all know where this experiment ends, right?