It is very irritating when people complain here that it's not faster than classical or other such complaints.

Please, it is still a research project, it's not like a regular computer just faster, it is novel research.

Regarding the quantum side, I would love to know if by programmable qubit are they referring to an error corrected qubit or just one where gates can be applied.

I suspect it means error corrected qubits. I was wondering if there was work being done on algorithms that are noise resistant and as such can take advantage of the raw qubit count instead of the error corrected qubit count.

I would love to work in this area but I think it's all research at the moment. It's really interesting, how it actually works, not just the hand wavy abstractions.

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ZacharyVernec 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

Programmable qubit is almost certainly referring to one where gates can be applied, non-error-corrected. The error correction overhead would be much larger than 4-to-1.

Although note, the above is if you are referring to error correction in the traditional sense of error correcting codes. According to Ars Technica's article [1], the non-programmable qubits are being used for leakage removal: coupling to the computational/programmable qubits and stabilizing them, but not being used for any computation themselves. This is far from error correcting codes in the mathematical sense, but it does have a similar purpose of reducing noise.

For what you are wondering about in your penultimate sentence is possible for any algorithms, I am not sure, but it's a very good question. However, I know that for general algorithms, there is a range of error reduction techniques you can use short of full QEC, IBM has a decent blog post about them [2]. Usually, the trade-off is error reduction vs increased number of shots and post-processing (so vs time, not space).

[1] https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/11/ibm-to-offer-access-...

[2] https://www.ibm.com/quantum/blog/qec-continuum

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pugfugly 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Generally if they say "qubit" they mean physical qubit, and if they say "logical qubit" they mean error-corrected (and would spend lots of time talking about whatever improvements to error correction they've made). In publicity stuff, unqualified, it will definitely mean physical qubit.

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doublerabbit 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I don't see why Quantum would be faster than classical. I see quantum having more depth than speed.

I however no knowledge of the subject other than that you can turn a binary bit in to a 2.

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packetlost 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

It's better to think of QPUs as highly specialized coprocessors that do certain things really well. You would only every really use them for problems they're good at. Like ALU vs FPU vs GPU.

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superb_dev 2 days ago | parent [-]

What problems are they good at?

	▲	packetlost 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		Shor's algorithm is the quintessential example, but there are other algorithms (mostly graph algorithms) that are NP and hard would be very efficient on a quantum computer.

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freetonik 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

It’s healthier to think of neither depth nor speed. The space of problems best suited for quantum computers is altogether orthogonal to those dimensions.

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hn_submit 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

IBM isn't in the research business. It's a for profit company that wants to sell you these machines for an incredible amount of money.

But it's all a scam since these machines can do nothing useful, except allowing you to try out programming simple quantum algorithms.

BTW they keep obfuscating the difference between logical and physical qubits. Logical qubits is what it's all about but this article sort of uses them interchangeably. Most of the time they're talking about physical qubits, though.

Someone once calculated that you'd need a million physical qubits to crack RSA-4096. That shows you how much farther we have to go for these machines to be useful.

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danparsonson 2 days ago | parent [-]

"IBM is the largest industrial research organization in the world" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM)

	▲	holgerschurig 2 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Well, that is from 2020, according to their reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM#cite_note-196 And the reference is from IBM itself. So how can we be sure it isn't just PR? One example: one of the countries with the largest population and thus an incredible large domestic market is China. When they do anything (or the government steers the industry to do anything) they often do it at a scale not known in the already developed world. And now the west is withholding certain technology from China since it seems to be aggressive as well. Not as aggressive as Russia or the USA, but still. So they don't get various technology anymore. But so far all I know that one level in the chinese Huawai development center could host more researches than IBMs Zürich lab. Could. Not does. And as a consequence they bumped out their research in this area. And now my assumption: knowing how large-scale things in China are often done, I guess that they do their industrial research equally in a large scale. So I wouldn't wonder that e.g. Huawei has by now a larger research division than IBM. The archived article from IBM mentions 3000 researchers. That's not THAT much. Just one of the 4 german institutionalized research agencies (Fraunhofer, Max Planck, etc) has more researchers. For me, it's not unthinkable that a big chinese company has 4000 researchers by now. Especially since they HAVE to research/steal key technology these days.
	▲	hn_submit 2 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I would claim that IBM is an "applied research organization." Their research has the sole purpose of developing a product that they can sell. They're not like Bell Labs that does lots of basic research.

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serioussecurity 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

If it's IBM it's a marketing project ;)

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aaron695 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

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