IBM has created a 50-qubit quantum computer

At the IEEE Industry Summit on the Future of Computing, IBM's quantum computing and artificial intelligence research manager, Dario Gil, announced the creation of a 50-qubit prototype processor with quantum bits. Quantum computers differ from classical computers in that they use a special type of bits for calculations - qubits, which can be in several states at the same time (imagine a tossed coin that lands on both heads and tails). This allows the development of more efficient computational algorithms. Back in 2016, the corporation launched the Quantum Experience project, which made it possible to use a quantum computer with 5 qubits in the public domain. Quantum Experience currently offers an expanded version of 20 qubits, and in the future we expect access to a 50-qubit processor. Note that IBM is not the first company in the world whose portfolio will include quantum computers. The Canadian manufacturer D-Wave has been working in this area for several years now. His first computer, equipped with a 128-qubit chip, was released back in 2011. It operates in partial quantum mode, which allows it to solve machine learning or artificial intelligence problems, but it is not able to perform arbitrary tasks. And in January, D-Wave released a model of a quantum computer with 2,000 qubits. Already today, quantum computers are used by Los Alamos National Laboratory, Google, NASA and Lockheed Martin.