Inside Quantum Technology

Hackers introduced to Xanadu’s “First taste is free” on Borealis

(Hackaday) Hackaday’s Al Williams brings Xanadu’s Borealis announcement to its hacker audience and points out the “free” offer. IQT-Summarizes Williams’ article below and also recommends reading the comment section from at close of article.

There are a few ways to access real quantum computers — often for free — over the Internet. However, most of these are previous-generation machines that have limited capabilities. Great for learning, perhaps, but not something you could do anything practical with.

Xanadu, however, has announced what they claim to be a computer capable of reaching quantum advantage that is free for anyone to use, within limits. Borealis — the computer in question — uses photonic states and has the capability of working with over 216 squeezed-state qubits.

The company is selling time on the computer, but the free tier includes 5 million free shots on Borealis and 10 million shots on an earlier series of quantum computers. You can also buy pay-as-you go service for about $100 per million shots on Borealis.

While a few million shots may sound like a lot, we noticed that the quickstart demo consumes 10,000 shots and that’s presumably something simple. That’s still about 500 runs of that on Borealis — not bad for free on a state-of-the-art quantum computer. You will be wanting to debug with a simulator, though.

NOTE: “Hackaday serves up Fresh Hacks Every Day from around the Internet” according to its website. The site bills says itself in these words  “.  .playful posts are the gold-standard in entertainment for engineers and engineering enthusiasts.”

Sandra K. Helsel, Ph.D. has been researching and reporting on frontier technologies since 1990.  She has her Ph.D. from the University of Arizona.

 

 

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