Dear startup members, founders, CEOs,
Over the last two weeks I have been able to speak with many of you one on one, which is a fascinating and humbling experience.
Based on all these conversations as well as the many survey responses from a month ago we are switching to one show up as you please weekly networking event. We will alternate timezones every week rather than split the group to facilitate relationships amongst our members, we will briefly discuss a topic of interest or update and then proceed to a virtual one on one matchmaking amongst our founders using the super Run the World conference platform. Come and go as you please but we hope you will show up :)
The first of these events is tomorrow August 26th at 10 am EST and we would love for you to drop in. Simply RSVP at the following link and see you there tomorrow https://www.runtheworld.today/app/invitation/6285
We will then do evenings the following week for our friends in Asia and Australia (hoping that many Europeans and Americans will join too), and then morning again 2 weeks from now. This way, we hope to foster new and better relationships as a group and individually.
Also, going forward, we will continue to provide our virtual community (see you in the chat?), the digital resources and events. But we will also offer more tailored support to all our members as well as matchmaking services (other startups, vendors, investors, etc) to meet your needs.
If we haven’t spoken one on one please reach out to me to schedule a time. If we have spoken already you will receive follow up this week.
We are bringing in two big name sponsors to grow our capabilities. We would love to have any of you join us as a guest on WQWD (send me an email if interested) for some free advertising (we reach ~15K folks). Denise continues to lend her amazing support and Farai puts in a lot of the hard work - we all are committed to being a valuable resource to you and your startups.
Yours,
André M. König
Quantum Things
Quantum volume (QV) was in the headlines this week with IBM’s announcement of a QV of 64 for one of their devices but what is quantum volume and does it matter?
The term Quantum Volume was proposed by the team from IBM in late 2019 in a bid to aggregate all the important metrics of a quantum computer into one figure that can be universally applied as a demonstration of progress across different hardware platforms. It is generally now accepted by the community and major players like Honeywell are using it as an important indicator.
The Quantum Volume (QV) protocol is used to test how well a quantum computer can run a circuit consisting of random two-qubit gates acting in parallel on a subset of the device’s qubits. The circuit is reconfigured to suit the architecture of a particular device thus allowing for the protocol to be implemented on different hardware platforms. Quantum circuits can be simplified by looking at two important attributes; the number of qubits involved (circuit width) and the number of operations that the circuit can run before the qubits decohere (circuit depth). The objective of the QV protocol is to identify the largest square-shaped circuit — one where the width and depth are equal — that can be run on a given quantum device. Without boring you to death with details which you can find here, QV is calculated by raising 2 to the power of the highest depth and corresponding width for which the probability of measuring any of the desired outputs on the device with a confidence interval greater than 97.725% is greater than two-thirds. The highest QV achieved to date is 64 (2^6) and this has been first reported by Honeywell (on 6 fully connected qubits) then recently by IBM (on 27 qubits). In summary, what this all means is that the best quantum computing devices at present can successfully run the QV protocol on six qubits at depth six but fail beyond that.
TLDR; While technically speaking QV is an important figure to keep track of, the true measure of progress in quantum computing comes from having solid use cases.
OneQuantum News
The White House seeks to advance America’s AI and QIS leadership by doubling Federal research and development (R&D) spending in nondefense AI and QIS by FY2022. Read the full report here for more details.
This is how the Netherlands aims to become the Silicon Valley of quantum technology.
Just a reminder that we have a lot of quantum content here gathered from conversations with great people from across the quantum technology ecosystem. Don’t forget to like and subscribe.
Signing off
In parting, I don’t know how you feel about this Tweet because it offended me as a fault-tolerant parent, and the best I can do is to teleport it.
If you are not yet a member, we would love to have you join us.
See you all next week!