First software published for IBM quantum computer / IBM Blog

Quantum computing is now handled by almost all the major IT-related companies. IBM, Google, Microsoft - all conduct research in this area. IBM has successfully created its own 5-qubit quantum chip. Based on the chip, a quantum computer called IBM Quantum Experience was created. Four qubits are used to work with data, and the fifth is used to correct errors during calculations (errors without correction are the Achilles heel of quantum computers). This equipment is installed in one of the research laboratories IBM, which is located in the state of New York, USA.

In May, our company announced the opening of public access to this quantum computer. With it, users can check the operation of their experimental programs on a real system. We believe that in the future such quantum computers will be used in many fields. Moreover, they will not be very useful to an ordinary user, you can’t play games on them. But for industry, science, energy - here such systems are very necessary. Most likely, in the near future, specialists in various fields will be able to work with such computers remotely - through cloud spheres, similar to that launched by IBM.

Now IBM Quantum Experienceavailable only to researchers. To be able to work with the system, you need to clearly indicate the tasks for which you need to use the resources of this service. The IBM quantum computer is a universal system that can handle any quantum algorithm. This distinguishes such a computer from adiabatic quantum systems.



Thanks to its versatility, IBM Quantum Experience can solve a number of tasks much more efficiently than conventional computers, albeit super-performance ones, can do. Basically, these are tasks of the following nature:
• Fast processing of huge databases;
• Optimization of processes whose nature is close to the so-called traveling salesman problem ;
• Analysis and processing of scientific data with the identification of certain patterns;
• Factorization of numbers using the Shore algorithm. If quantum systems begin to work with such operations, you will have to forget about cryptography in its modern form.



As for the last example, the IBM quantum computer can work with this algorithm. But really effective work requires more qubits. By 2025, our company intends to assemble a system containing from 50 to 100 qubits. In this case, we can already talk about the start of work on complex practical problems.



Since May of this year, many specialists from various fields have been able to work with IBM's quantum computer. Some introduced their own programs for the IBM Quantum Experience. Astrophysicist Christine Morano from the California Institute of Technology (USA) presented the most algorithms . According to Morano, these are the simplest quantum algorithms., for example, Grover and Deutsch-Yogi algorithms written in Python. Morano offers users who have access to the IBM Quantum Experience to modify these programs for themselves and test their work on a quantum system.