If not for the fact that there are several installed, functional quantum computers on the planet chewing away on tough problems—including the burdensome issue of their own operation—one might suspect that these systems were still more science fiction than reality.
Still, with each passing year, more quantum devices are installed, including, most recently, at Los Alamos National Laboratory, with the hopes of being able to deploy them efficiently and find solutions to problems that far outpace conventional approaches to computing. The work to create stable platforms for quantum computers, or more specifically, the requisite tooling to support actual applications, is often locked behind thesis research or kept a mostly guarded secret by the few users that are working with D-Wave machines. What this means, according to Dave Wecker, who heads the Quantum Architectures and Computation (QUARC) group at Microsoft Research, is that a lot of the work on stabilizing such platforms is tossed or stashed and thus doesn’t contribute to future of quantum systems.
The real problem, Wecker says, is that while many organizations that understand the specific types of problems quantum systems solve know how they might use one in practice, they have no idea how to get to that point. In other words, knowing how a quantum computer works and how it might be made to work are two very different things.
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