What is quantum annealer, and what can it do?

While they use quantum mechanical concepts, quantum annealers are great for optimizing solutions by quickly searching over a space and finding a minimum (or “solution”) and sampling problems. For optimizing solution, you can think of this as looking over a landscape and finding the low point. An annealer does that!

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0:00 Intro
0:57 Quantum Annealers
4:30 Universal Gate Quantum Computer
6:34 Can we solve the halting problem on a quantum computer?
7:05 Is a quantum annealer a quantum computer?
7:53 Why Qubit counts aren't the most important factor
9:14 Divincenzo Criteria for Quantum Hardware
10:54 Quantum Volume and how good a quantum computer actually is

Universal gate quantum computers have a broad application. This system relies on building really reliable qubits where basic quantum circuit operations, or gates, can be put together to create any sequence, running more and more complex algorithms.

Quantum computers, however, have their own set of gates that are very different from the set of classical computing gates.

Universal gate quantum computers can come in a lot of hardware implementations as well. Some are made of superconducting qubits, like the IBM, Google, and Bleximo quantum chips, others, like the IonQ and Honeywell machines are made of trapped Ions. However, other companies like psiquantum, is focusing on Silicon Photonic Qubits.

So, will we be able to solve any problem on a quantum computer that actually can’t be solved on a classical computer? Well, using a classical computer, we can always simulate a quantum computer with n qubits. it gets less practical to do so, so it’s really hard to have a quantum simulator beyond 30-40 qubits. But because a classical computer could simulate a quantum computer of any size, that means no, we cannot solve something like the halting problem.

Algorithms like Shor’s (to break RSA cryptography) and Grover’s (faster search) as well as the dozens of other algorithms will also be able to run on a universal quantum computer. What quantum computers can do is solve a certain set of problems faster than classical computer - but it cannot solve EVERYTHING faster.

What is quantum annealer, and what can it do?

While they rely on the same quantum mechanical concepts, quantum annealers are especially great for optimizing solutions to problems by quickly searching over a space and finding a minimum (or “solution”) and also sampling problems. For optimizing solution, you can think of this as looking over a landscape and finding where the low point is. An annealer does that!

Quantum annealers are built for translating Quantum unconstrained binary optimization (QUBO) and Ising problems effectively onto quantum hardware. The problems this can solve efficiently are traveling salesman, scheduling problems, optimal placement problems, graph coloring problems, and even solving games!

The D-Wave machine is probably the most famous example of a quantum annealer.

It’s built using superconducting qubits, which is a design based on a Cooper pair (which is a pair of electrons, or any other fermion) with a Josephson junction. This is actually the same type of qubit used for many of the universal gate quantum computer systems!

What makes a good qubit?

The Divincenzo criteria:
1. A scalable physical system with well characterized qubits
2. The ability to initialize the state of the qubits
3. Long decoherence times, much longer than the gate operation time
4. A “universal” set of quantum gates
5. A qubit-specific measurement capability

IBM has come up with a metric they call “quantum volume” and other quantum computing companies have started using.

Quantum volume is a single number designed to be more mindful about calculating performance of a quantum system. It uses many more features of a quantum computer, including number of qubits, gate and measurement errors, crosstalk and the topology, or connectivity, of the quantum device.

So hopefully next time you read an article about a breakthrough in quantum computing qubits, you dig a little deeper and ask some more questions - what’s the type of quantum computer? How many qubits? What is the hardware? What are the error rates?

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