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UK House Ordered Demolished Because of Software Error

Printer Blamed

1 min read
UK House Ordered Demolished Because of Software Error

According to Daily Mail last week, a couple in Aughton, Lancashire, UK has been told by the local town council that they have to tear down their nearly complete £1 million dream home because the house was several yards longer and wider than approved on the plans they submitted.

The source of the problem, the couple claims, is that they used AutoCad software to draw the house blueprints, and when they printed the plans out for submittal to building control for approval, the software automatically scaled down the blueprint for printing by some 4%.

The couple said they didn't realize that had happened, but said that when they had submitted the plans, they indicated:

 "that all the dimensions should be checked or measured on site and not scaled from the drawing."

They assumed everything was okay because they received planning permission to proceed.

The town council, the Daily Mail reports, said that the problem wasn't just the size of the house but there were 15 additional discrepancies between what was built and the plans submitted.

Sounds like there was a bit more involved than just a printer driver problem.

The couple, who have already lost one appeal, is taking their case to the High Court to try to stop the demolition.

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An IBM Quantum Computer Will Soon Pass the 1,000-Qubit Mark

The Condor processor is just one quantum-computing advance slated for 2023

4 min read
This photo shows a woman working on a piece of apparatus that is suspended from the ceiling of the laboratory.

A researcher at IBM’s Thomas J. Watson Research Center examines some of the quantum hardware being constructed there.

Connie Zhou/IBM

IBM’s Condor, the world’s first universal quantum computer with more than 1,000 qubits, is set to debut in 2023. The year is also expected to see IBM launch Heron, the first of a new flock of modular quantum processors that the company says may help it produce quantum computers with more than 4,000 qubits by 2025.

This article is part of our special report Top Tech 2023.

While quantum computers can, in theory, quickly find answers to problems that classical computers would take eons to solve, today’s quantum hardware is still short on qubits, limiting its usefulness. Entanglement and other quantum states necessary for quantum computation are infamously fragile, being susceptible to heat and other disturbances, which makes scaling up the number of qubits a huge technical challenge.

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