NEWS
Quantum socks and super software
Our Co-founder and CEO Richard Murray recently visited Q2B Silicon Valley, Santa Clara, one of the world’s largest gatherings of the quantum computing community. He provided his thoughts and takeaways in an article for The Quantum Insider. Here’s an extract from the article:
The US air force kicked off the keynotes. A few slides in, and they were showing off their Innovare (sic) advancement centre detailing impressive intentions to host ‘multiple fridges, trapped ion and photonics setups’. Its plan showed quantum devices spanning the battlefield: from distributed timing to communications and entanglement swapping, to intelligence analysis.
William Olivier from MIT next gave some startling results comparing the superiority of the 2021 Chinese USTC quantum supremacy results over the Google Sycamore results from 2019 (Quantum advantage: 10^3x Google in 2019 vs 10^7x USTC in 2021)
The middle of my day was taken up by two talks. The first was from Cambridge Quantum Computing – now Quantinuum – who discussed its open-source TKET platform and capabilities for improving quantum code. Broadly, it allows code to be ported across and optimised for different quantum platforms, for example, by optimising to reduce the number of noisy operations. Personally, having never programmed a superconducting quantum computer, I was surprised by how different the connectivity can be between platforms, and also how even the basis gates on offer are different. TKET takes care of all that.
Quote of the day: ‘Hardware is hard’- William Oliver- MIT
Fact for the day: ‘$0.5Bn of revenue was secured from quantum companies last year’ Boston Consulting Group
Biggest stand: IBM
Most attended talk: AWS
Best swag: Quantum socks!
Take home for the day: The quality of professional tools for people to work with and optimise quantum systems has come on a long way and is very impressive.
