Posted on 12/22/2021 10:50:24 AM PST by ShadowAce
Quantum computing company Rigetti has announced it is exploring experimental new hardware configurations that could improve the performance of its quantum processors.
As explained in a blog post, the firm has introduced a third energy state to its qubits, thus turning them into qutrits. According to Rigetti, doing so allows for significantly more information to be manipulated, while also decreasing readout errors by up to 60%.
“Accessing the third state in our processors is useful for researchers exploring the cutting edge of quantum computing, quantum physics and those interested in traditional qubit-based algorithms alike,” the company explained.
Rigetti is currently offering access to qutrit operations via Quil-T, its pulse-level extension to the Quil instruction set architecture.
A quantum bit (or qubit) is the smallest unit of quantum information, an analogue to the binary bit of classical computing. However, unlike the traditional bit, a qubit can adopt a value of one, zero or anything in between by virtue of a phenomenon known as superposition.
“Qubits are the basic building block of a quantum processor, and are so named because they represent a continuum of complex superpositions of two basic quantum states,” explains Alex Hill, Senior Quantum Systems Engineer at Rigetti.
“The power of qubits comes in part from their ability to encode significantly more information than a classical bit - an infinite set of states between 0 and 1.”
Historically, researchers have attempted to achieve quantum advantage (the point at which quantum systems outstrip traditional supercomputers in a meaningful way) by focusing on increasing the number of qubits on a quantum processor. Simply put, the larger the number of qubits, the more powerful the quantum machine.
Just last month, for example, IBM unveiled a record-breaking 127-qubit processor, codenamed Eagle. And Rigetti itself now offers an 80-qubit processor (the Aspen-11), created by linking two separate 40-qubit processors together.
However, Rigetti contends that the addition of a third state to qubits, creating a three-level quantum system based on qutrits, represents another path to improving the performance of quantum machines.
“With carefully-chosen readout parameters, classification performance can be significantly better when choosing between | 2> and | 0>, rather than the default classification between | 0> and | 1>,” the company explained.
In future, it might even be possible to push towards qubits with an even larger number of states, says Rigetti. However, because an ever-smaller amount of energy separates states beyond zero and one, noise and control issues become increasingly difficult to surmount.
Right. What’s a qubit?
How long can you tread water?
So Noah asked G-d, what’s a qubit?
5.56mm
My daughters have been using trinary logic all their lives.
I see what you did there.
Quite right........................
Cool, base3 math.
0: 00
1: 01
2: 02
3: 10
4: 11
5: 12
6: 20
7: 21
8: 22
9: 30
I knew my teachers weren’t very smart when we were learning base 6 and base 8 math and started doing adding & subtracting & multiplying. They didn’t get it, it went over their heads. 3rd-4th grade math.
Turned out poor Q*bert got CTE from all of those knocks on his head.
There was a sci-fi book I read in the 70s where a computer was developed where each “bit” had 12 different possible values, vastly increasing computing capacity. That computer would be used to design the “Graphic Omniscient Device [GOD]” which would model all reality. No spoilers, but the book has held up well from what I recall. “When Harlie Was One”.
That reminds me of a fun bible study I attended. The guy used a medical study on drowning rats to make his point.
A group of rats were drowned, all but one. They lasted about 6 minutes. Then the 2nd group was drowned, alongside a control group. The control group lasted about 6 minutes but the other group had that one rat who had survived. He swam around and encouraged the others. They lasted 15 minutes.
The guy said that this rat had communicated HOPE to these other rats. “In this case, false hope”. Everyone cracked up.
I have long believed that shifting to a trinary “byte” would the biggest monumental gain in computing ever. Instead of a standard 8 bit byte being 256 distinct values it would be 6561 values.
It's partly a marketing crutch imo.
I'm sure that computer technology will continue to evolve, just not as fast as some people investors would like to think.
This is why crypto currency is doomed.
All y’all ain’t right
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