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IPFS News Link • Technology: Computer Hardware

Primitive quantum computers may already outperform standard machines for very specific tasks

• http://www.gizmag.com, Colin Jeffrey

But now researchers have come up with a way to use even primitive quantum computers to run calculations that can already outperform the capabilities of classical computing for very specific tasks.

There already exist a number of quantum processors used for research, but these have a very limited number of qubits at their disposal, partly because the fragile nature of quantum entanglement that encodes the qubits makes it extremely difficult to maintain many more. For example, IBM's cloud-enabled quantum processor boasts just five qubits and, as a result,can only run limited algorithms and experiments. This means such devices aren't very useful if you want to perform tasks that your average desktop computer can already do very well.

However, for solving extremely specialized problems, quantum mechanics is leaps and bounds ahead. In this vein, researchers from the University of Bristol and the University of Western Australia are studying the processing capabilities of smaller, simpler designs as precursors for large-scale quantum computers, but also as processing units in their own right.


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