@heather thats a very interesting question. many simulators might be ideal ie idealize away decoherence. DS & probably a good one to ask & might know more about this. its probably not hard to ("roughly") simulate decoherence in an ideal simulator by periodically "adding" random noise with different properties to the qubits. some of these questions might fit on Physics...

as for error correction, there are many schemes for that and again, a good simulator would support different schemes... presumably there may be some stdized libraries/ demos out there. this whole area is quite new/ evolving tho... have not researched it much myself yet... its long been on my "todo" list...

@heather only 5 qubits huh? thats a pretty massive limitation although ofc wouldnt expect much more at this time. although dwave is already up to ½K. (now if only dwave would mount an open system also!) was scanning thru all their documentation & FAQ, announcements etc, where is that stated? it feels like they have buried that little )( factoid. :( ... where did you see that? btw have you actually run any simulations or live code on the site?

@vzn, I know it's 5 qubits because I've run simulations on their "ideal" simulator; I haven't yet run anything on their real qc. If you make an account, you can try that out. I'm guessing the limitation is 5 qubits because a. it starts getting difficult to write code/run stuff like that, and b. they don't want anyone doing anything, uh, nefarious.

@heather lol "nefarious". the diagrams in the tutorials show 5 qubits. not sure about their physical machine (maybe it is also 5, presumably) but nobody in the world other than dwave is doing more than a handful of qubits, & dwaves are different (adiabatic)...

@vzn did you invite me?

@vzn, indeed =) you'd think though that for their pure simulator, they'd have more than 5 (::shrugs::) its cool they have anything, though.