Recap of Two Significant Quantum Events Held Last Week by IBM and Berkeley's Simons Institute

Unfortunately, both events were occurring simultaneously last week so unless you are able to put yourself in a superposition state you would be force to choose one event or the other. The IBM Quantum Challenge provided four problems of increasing difficulty for users to solve as part of a four year anniversary of their first IBM Quantum Experience system going online in 2016.  It also had the goal to continue to spur interest from potential users and programmers for their Qiskit software platform.  The challenge apparently had a high rate of participation and statistics from IBM showed they had over 1700 participants who ran over 5 billion quantum circuits over the 96 hour period. IBM has expanded their fleet of machines on the cloud to 18 at this time and it is quite impressive that these machines completed so many circuits in this time period.  They indicated that they set records for daily number of quantum circuit executions during this challenge. We should note that one of the problems required that each job execution be repeated 8192 times (they call this a shot), but it still represents something over 600 thousand job submissions. Keeping all the machines running reliably under this workload is a significant achievement, particularly since the technicians responsible had to operate under various Covid-19 social distancing and safety precautions that may have added to the difficulty.

The other event was a five day online workshop on Quantum Devices: Simulation, Supremacy, and Optimization held by the Simons Institute of the Theory of Computing at the University of California, Berkeley.  There were many talks given by renowned researchers in quantum computing and a panel session at the end of event.  Fortunately, the Simons Institute recorded the videos of the talks and already has them posted.  I think the conference organizers set another record for how quickly videos were posted after the conference.  The talks are highly recommended and you can see the agenda and view the talks here.

May 9, 2020