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Trump administration establishes $75M quantum computing centers

thehill.com

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Re: Trump administration establishes $75M quantum computing centers

#51

Post by roenxi »

saiya-jin wrote: post #37
trekrich wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

so close to admitting trump has done something decent!

Is this coming from him directly? I would be really surprised, he has plenty of advisors for that. What comes out of him directly is more visible on ie twitter, different story

Better or worse, little of what the executive does is really because of the president directly. The president chooses the sort of people to put in positions of power then the whole ship largely sorts itself out. But the president gets to be responsible for everything because they are nominally in charge, and people keep pretending they are superheros with all sorts of ability to personally oversee how the US operates.

We can certainly say that if Trump didn't want quantum computing research to happen his administration wouldn't be doing it. So if it does, he has de facto supported it. Even if by inaction.

Re: Trump administration establishes $75M quantum computing centers

#52

Post by mirekrusin »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #16
rubber_duck wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It's the sort of fundamental research which private industry tends to under-produce because it's hard for any given company to recoup the full value of the R&D, but the target area is something with potential downstream practical implications. Quantum computing ? I've seen just a few months ago some article about a single start-up raising >200M ?

There is a difference between doing fundamental research and bringing a product to market. We know enough about quantum computers to be able to build some of them in limited ways which are commercially useful in very specific domains, so then companies can get investment to do that. But we still don't really understand all of the fundamentals, and it's always hard to raise investment for fundamental research. Suppose…

Bitcoin holders? /s

Re: Trump administration establishes $75M quantum computing centers

#53

Post by pbhjpbhj »

rvz wrote: post #41
russellbeattie wrote: post #33

This administration is anti-science in every way possible way - from the climate to covid to education and more. $75M is literally a rounding error when it comes to the federal budget. This is pure election year nonsense - basically it's a $75 million marketing ploy (using tax dollars) to beef up the administration's pitiful record on science. I am looking forward to the outrageous lies about this soon. Trump will ha…

[flagged]

>The situations you bring up is everyone's fault for not taking the pandemic seriously from the start. //

So Trump isn't a leader and should have been ignored from the get-go? Or, he is a leader and his actions are criminally incompetent? [or purposefully malicious??]

Do you really believe it should be everyone for themselves rather than having a centrally funded means of establishing scientific consensus and propagating life-saving advice?

Re: Trump administration establishes $75M quantum computing centers

#54

Post by ahelwer »

dr_dshiv wrote: post #31

Someone needs to invest in developing improved mental models for quantum computers. Much of the development of classical computing (particular from a user perspective) was driven by metaphors: memory, stacks, pipes, files, folders, etc. What are useful metaphors in the application or use of quantum computers?

Quantum computers are modeled with extremely basic linear algebra. Quantum states are vectors and gates are matrices which multiply those vectors to get new vectors. How much simpler do you want? You can explain most of it as rotations around the unit circle which we all learn in high school or earlier.

The problem is pop science crap that tries to explain superposition and entanglement with complete word salad instead of "linear combination" and "product vector cannot be factored into tensor product of single-qbit states", respectively.

Anyway it is extremely doubtful that more programmers will need to learn how to program a quantum computer than, say, will need to learn how to program a GPU. They're both useful co-processors for very specific workloads. Programming will remain a fundamentally classical endeavor.

Re: Trump administration establishes $75M quantum computing centers

#55

Post by ahelwer »

SheinhardtWigCo wrote: post #3

Surely this amount pales in comparison to the likely level of investment in this field by the intelligence community, considering the implications for cryptography. This is like announcing $75m for nuclear technology research during the Manhattan Project.

NIST is already well into a post-quantum crypto competition. Any serious user of cryptography will have switched to the new protocols by the time quantum computers become powerful enough to crack production RSA. Cloudflare has already prototyped protocols in TLS [0]. Scott Aaronson has gone on record saying he would be "astonished" if this happened within a decade.

This isn't like the cold war days. The quantum computing research community is close-knit and people would notice researchers being hoovered up by the NSA; this hasn't happened.

Shor's algorithm is undeniably a groundbreaking result but is not the killer app of quantum computers. It's more of an unfortunate side-effect.

[0] https://blog.cloudflare.com/the-tls-post-quantum-experiment/

Re: Trump administration establishes $75M quantum computing centers

#56

Post by whoiskevin »

trekrich wrote: post #39
saiya-jin wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this coming from him directly? I would be really surprised, he has plenty of advisors for that. What comes out of him directly is more visible on ie twitter, different story

You dont really know what directlys come from him though. His twitter account and all the stuff he says is just a smoke screen to keep everyone outraged. Who knows what he is really doing in the background.

Oh please. As many have said stop pretending that he is playing chess when he is sitting there eating the pieces like a toddler.

Re: Trump administration establishes $75M quantum computing centers

#57

Post by loudtieblahblah »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #2

This appears to be a surprisingly level-headed government initiative. The amount is enough to do something but not so much as to be a colossal boondoggle. It's the sort of fundamental research which private industry tends to under-produce because it's hard for any given company to recoup the full value of the R&D, but the target area is something with potential downstream practical implications. > bipartisan Also by…

>preceded by the words lack of or similar.

Eh, bipartisan stuff still happens. Look at the military industrial complex. Expanding executive power, expanding the surveillance state. Pro wall street regulation repeal.

Usually its to screw us

Re: Trump administration establishes $75M quantum computing centers

#58

Post by koheripbal »

zenhack wrote: post #26
mhxion wrote: post #9

This initiative is launched quicker than I expected, considering the pressure on federal budget due to the pandemic. It's part of National Quantum Initiative Act, signed into law in December, 2018. https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/6227

$75M is rounding error compared to anything being discussed in the vicinity of the pandemic; I wouldn't really expect it to enter into the conversation.

Every line item in the budget is a rounding error until you add them all up.

Re: Trump administration establishes $75M quantum computing centers

#59

Post by akhilcacharya »

read_if_gay_ wrote: post #46
russellbeattie wrote: post #33

This administration is anti-science in every way possible way - from the climate to covid to education and more. $75M is literally a rounding error when it comes to the federal budget. This is pure election year nonsense - basically it's a $75 million marketing ploy (using tax dollars) to beef up the administration's pitiful record on science. I am looking forward to the outrageous lies about this soon. Trump will ha…

Is there anything, anything that this administration could do that you wouldn’t immediately spin and shit on?

Yes, the President could resign.
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