Discussion around the matching bullish take: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21053405
What do you mean by “matching”? The bullish take is just a different take that presumably must develop answers to the points of this post to remain a viable belief option. It actually strikes me somewhat as editorializing to place this link here with the wording you chose. If anything in your linked discussion actually addresses the substantive points of this post, why not link to those items specifically? What would…
Quantum computers: amazing progress, but probably false supremacy claims
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Re: Quantum computers: amazing progress, but probably false supremacy claims
#42If quantum supremacy was not possible, wouldn't that mean that something is wrong with our physics understanding? So when people say quantum supremacy is impossible, do they say that the device itself is extremely complicated to build (like an earth to moon elevator for example), or that quantum supremacy isn't allowed not even in principle?
Both, actually. Some interpretations of quantum mechanics imply that QC is impossible, some imply that it's infeasible for any meaningful problems.
Re: Quantum computers: amazing progress, but probably false supremacy claims
#43PS: I don't have the expertise to make a strong argument here, but it seems like an intriguing idea. Anything fundamentally against it?
Re: Quantum computers: amazing progress, but probably false supremacy claims
#44My level of expertise on quantum computing is low. The announce of the imminent advent of the Quantum Computer seems to be recurring every few months these last few years because it's a moving target. HN recently featured an article about a supposed quantum-only algorithm being applied to normal computing. Algorithms are a vastly larger space to explore than general computing paradigms. Computer hardware is still adv…
Re: Quantum computers: amazing progress, but probably false supremacy claims
#45Discussion around the matching bullish take: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21053405
What do you mean by “matching”? The bullish take is just a different take that presumably must develop answers to the points of this post to remain a viable belief option. It actually strikes me somewhat as editorializing to place this link here with the wording you chose. If anything in your linked discussion actually addresses the substantive points of this post, why not link to those items specifically? What would…
Re: Quantum computers: amazing progress, but probably false supremacy claims
#46I've had my eyes on Adrian Thompson's genetically evolved FPGA circuits for a while now - they do amazing things very economically and exploit analog circuit properties. So I've always wondered what if we make unreliable but super tiny atomic level programmable gates where we know the unreliability stems from quantum fluctuations, and then evolve circuits over millions of generations (A.T. ran thousands) to see if th…
If you put an antenna or something next to it there was a good chance it would stop working properly for example.
Re: Quantum computers: amazing progress, but probably false supremacy claims
#47> As you know, I expect that quantum supremacy cannot be achieved at all. There’s the source of his skepticism, not some specific flaw he’s identified in these new results.
Not everyone is an armchair commentator merely repeating their unsubstantiated opinions. In Kalai's case, you could just say "Kalai's conjectures" and people familiar with the field are likely to recognize what you're referring to, although the may ask "which ones?" since he's produced several well-known ones in different math subfields.
Re: Quantum computers: amazing progress, but probably false supremacy claims
#48The usage of the word “supremacy” is probably the primary thing that rubs people the wrong way. When I first heard of it myself, it did feel a little strange. Doing some research into it though, it seems like the phrase and usage of quantum supremacy is pretty well defined and accepted by and large within the physics community. Supposedly the coiner of the term believed “quantum advantage” wouldn’t emphasize the poin…
> The author raises points in contention, but they largely just seem like nitpicks to me. It doesn't seem just like nitpicks to me. The core issue the author raises is the noise in the final output. If the quantum computer can only produce significantly noisy data (ie not in accordance with the theoretical distribution) whereas the conventional computer produces noiseless data, then that isn't a clear case of quantum…
“This fidelity should be resolvable with a few million measurements, since the uncertainty on FXEB is 1/√Ns, where Ns is the number of samples. Our model assumes that entangling larger and larger systems does not introduce additional error sources beyond the errors we measure at the single and two-qubit level — in the next section we will see how well this hypothesis holds.
FIDELITY ESTIMATION IN THE SUPREMACY REGIME
The gate sequence for our pseudo-random quantum circuit generation is shown in Fig.3. One cycle of the algorithm consists of applying single-qubit gates chose randomly from {√X,√Y,√W} on all qubits, followed by two-qubit gates on pairs of qubits. The sequences of gates which form the “supremacy circuits” are designed to minimize the circuit depth required to create a highly entangled state, which ensures computational complexity and classical hardness. While we cannot compute FXEB in the supremacy regime, we can estimate it using three variations to reduce the complexity of the circuits. In “patch circuits”, we remove a slice of two-qubit gates (a small fraction of the total number of two-qubit gates), splitting the circuit into two spatially isolated, non-interacting patches of qubits. We then compute the total fidelity as the product of the patch fidelities, each of which can be easily calculated. In “elided circuits”, we remove only a fraction of the initial two-qubit gates along the slice, allowing for entanglement between patches, which more closely mimics the full experiment while still maintaining simulation feasibility. Finally, we can also run full “verification circuits” with the same gate counts as our supremacy circuits, but with a different pattern for the sequence of two-qubit gates which is much easier to simulate classically [29]. Comparison between these variations allows tracking of the system fidelity as we approach the supremacy regime. We first check that the patch and elided versions of the verification circuits produce the same fidelity as the full verification circuits up to 53 qubits, as shown in Fig.4a. For each data point, we typically collect Ns=5×10^6 total samples over ten circuit instances, where instances differ only in the choices of single-qubit gates in each cycle. We also show predicted FXEB values computed by multiplying the no-error probabilities of single- and two-qubit gates and measurement [29]. Patch, elided, and predicted fidelities all show good agreement with the fidelities of the corresponding full circuits, despite the vast differences in computational complexity and entanglement. This gives us confidence that elided circuits can be used to accurately estimate the fidelity of more complex circuits. We proceed now to benchmark our most computationally difficult circuits. In Fig.4b, we show the measured FXEB for 53-qubit patch and elided versions of the full supremacy circuits with increasing depth. For the largest circuit with 53 qubits and 20 cycles, we collected Ns=30×10^6 samples over 10 circuit instances, obtaining FXEB=(2.24±0.21)×10^−3 for the elided circuits. With 5σ confidence, we assert that the average fidelity of running these circuits on the quantum processor is greater than at least 0.1%. The full data for Fig.4b should have similar fidelities, but are only archived since the simulation times (red numbers) take too long. It is thus in the quantum supremacy regime.”
Links to the figures can be found by viewing the paper directly here. If you have the time, I highly recommend reading the paper in full regardless: https://www.docdroid.net/file/download/h9oBikj/quantum-supre...
Re: Quantum computers: amazing progress, but probably false supremacy claims
#49I've had my eyes on Adrian Thompson's genetically evolved FPGA circuits for a while now - they do amazing things very economically and exploit analog circuit properties. So I've always wondered what if we make unreliable but super tiny atomic level programmable gates where we know the unreliability stems from quantum fluctuations, and then evolve circuits over millions of generations (A.T. ran thousands) to see if th…
Unfortunately just because the single component relies on quantum effects does not have anything to do with quantum speedup in computation.
Quantum computation exploits entanglement in larger scale than normal. The whole computational state must be entangled quantum state. Separated quantum effects result just classical computer. The quantum circuit must be carefully arranged so that the interference pattern yields the result you want.
Re: Quantum computers: amazing progress, but probably false supremacy claims
#50As far as QC scalability, the thing I wonder about is the cost of maintaining full entanglement of N qubits as N grows large. The debbie-downer perspective would be that for each additional qubit you add, you effectively double the cost of isolation from the environment, quantum error correction schemes, etc. So, while compute power for quantum algorithms grows exponentially in N, so would the cost of operating the m…