alt Hacker NewsIt 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.
Replies
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.
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.
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.
If it's IBM it's a marketing project ;)
[dead]
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