I don't believe in quantum supremacy.[1] I think that someone will eventually come up with a binary computer equivalent for Shor's Algorithm[2].
I further posit that there are no quantum algorithms without binary equivalents.
The quantum computing bubble
121–130 of 144 posts
Re: The quantum computing bubble
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
The reason exponential speedups are required is due to the extreme cost of quantum computing R&D and extremely limited quantum computers that come out of it. I can provision 1k CPU based servers or ~20 4x GPU based servers in a cloud computing environment for an hour for <$400. These are mature technologies with massive economies of scale behind them. A quantum computer needs to not only outperform scale out GPU/CPU…
> The reason exponential speedups are required is due to the extreme cost of quantum computing R&D and extremely limited quantum computers that come out of it. Hmmm. I'm no mathematician; but I thought the value of an "exponential speedup" is if you are trying to solve a problem with "exponential complexity". I don't know if "exponential compexity" is a thing; I'm pretty sure "exponential speedup" isn't. Is it correc…
In an informal setting, specifying an exponential speed up is equivalent to specifying a "linear time solution to a problem for which the best known classical algorithm has exponential complexity".
My point was that we have immense amounts of classical compute available. QC systems will not be economically viable unless they deliver gains which are >10x classical computers.
Re: The quantum computing bubble
#123its not exactly a secret we are very far away from useful quantum computers. Every comment i've ever seen from people in that industry, except those in a financial position to benefit, have said so.
Re: The quantum computing bubble
#124I don't believe in quantum supremacy.[1] I think that someone will eventually come up with a binary computer equivalent for Shor's Algorithm[2]. I further posit that there are no quantum algorithms without binary equivalents. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_supremacy [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shor%27s_algorithm
Are you extending that to pure polynomial speed ups like grover?
Because i find it really hard to believe there will ever be an O(sqrt(n)) classical algorithm for unstructured search. How could there possibly be?
Re: The quantum computing bubble
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It’s like, at a vacuum tube era, at best. How is it even remotely close? Vacuum tubes were a thriving industry, producing many groundbreaking products and services.
I think the comparison is still reasonable: while we do not have scalable quantum computers, the technologies developed for them have actually seen a lot of use: squeezed light and non-classical light, color centers, Josephson junctions, nonlinear-optics at the single-photon level, to name a few "terms of art" that should be google-able, are crucial for precision sensing and telecom.
I am not aware of a single telecom application that uses any of these technologies. Could you give some examples?
Re: The quantum computing bubble
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Quantum computing with todays technology :: Classical computing in the early era of vacuum tubes There's still a big difference. Even in the earliest era of computing with vacuum tubes (and even before), they were building machines that produced useful results: artillery tables, H-bomb simulations, cryptanalysis, etc. Most things these machines were used for were simply impractical without them. There's nothing eve…
Well, to be fair: quantum computers can do practical computations—but because “normal” computers are so unbelievably well developed, it is not practical to do them with quantum computers. The earliest era of computing was mechanical. The mechanism of thermionic transmission (vacuum tubes) was invented by Edison in 1883. The Colossus computer, with thousands of vacuum tubes, was the first practical use of vacuum tubes…
No, current quantum computers cannot do any practical computations. The gate errors are astronomical compared to even the earliest digital computers. Any algorithm with more than a few gates will produce just noise.
Re: The quantum computing bubble
#127This article is kind of crap. I kind of expected better from ft.
----- The reality is that none of these companies — or any other quantum computing firm, for that matter — are actually earning any real money. ----- ORLY? I guess I should go masssively short IBM shares then. https://newsroom.ibm.com/image/2022%20IBM%20Quantum%20Roadma...
---- Shor’s algorithm has been a godsend to the quantum industry, leading to untold amounts of funding from government security agencies all over the world. However, the commonly forgotten caveat here is that there are many alternative cryptographic schemes that are not vulnerable to quantum computers. It would be far from impossible to simply replace these vulnerable schemes with so-called “quantum-secure” ones. ---- ORLY? New cryptography can take 20 years or more to be fully deployed to all National Security Systems. NSS equipment is often used for decades after deployment. National security information intelligence value varies depending on classification, sensitivity, and subject, but it can require protection for many decades. -NSA
The solutions we do have do not work very well. Only the weakest FALCON-512 (bad name as it was only 64 bits of quantum security, now the dual lattice attack seems to reduce this to 20?), actually fits the TLS use case without breaking the internet. The signatures are just too big. Cloudflare has testing that proves this.
If that wasn't enough, this person is completely unaware of the annual survey of quantum researches that actually puts the arrivial of a cryptanalyically relevant quantum computer at 2030 or so. Peter Shor is actually one of the people polled in the survey, this person is not. And if you parts are still clean, you can look at the surveys estimates since 2018. These estimates are clearly trending towards sooner and sooner, instead of further and futher away.
If you still have doubts, read this: https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases...
Re: The quantum computing bubble
#128I don't believe in quantum supremacy.[1] I think that someone will eventually come up with a binary computer equivalent for Shor's Algorithm[2]. I further posit that there are no quantum algorithms without binary equivalents. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_supremacy [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shor%27s_algorithm
Are you extending that to pure polynomial speed ups like grover? Because i find it really hard to believe there will ever be an O(sqrt(n)) classical algorithm for unstructured search. How could there possibly be?
Based on 5 minutes of reading about Grover's algorithm, I don't see how a practical quantum computer (an analog system) can repeat an operation 2^64th times to break an 128 bit key without some bias towards interaction in the qubits involved. You'd have to have 1/(2^128) attenuation between each and every channel for that to even work reliably. That's 380 dB of signal to noise ratio. Typically 40 or 50 dB of isolation is all you get between channels in communications systems.
[Edit -- Additional considerations] In order for Grover's algorithm to work, you have to implement your conventional algorithm in Quantum hardware, with perfect fidelity. Digital computers can do this just fine because every gate is also a comparator, so signal to noise ratio isn't an issue. I fail to see how a quantum gate can possibly operate with enough fidelity to even just copy the input state after 2^64 stages, let alone complex logic AND the Grover Diffusion Operator.
Re: The quantum computing bubble
#129This is how I think about it. It's insurance money. If you're a manager of a big company like IBM, Microsoft or Google, you have to align your current product portfolio and future portfolio in such a way that shows your investor that your company will keep growing, even if your current products are stagnant. You can surely say Quantum computing won't do much in next 5 years. But what about 10 years? 20 years? 30 year…
Supposedly one of the really big, important things could do with a quantum computer (QC) is quickly solve to optimality instances of NP-complete optimization problems, e.g., problems in scheduling, resource allocation, logistics, etc. which can be formulated as linear programming problems (that need just knowledge of linear equations) where want all the variables to have whole number values, that is integer linear programming (ILP).
Okay, integer linear programming problems .... To get all excited about quantum computing (QC), need to get excited by the big money to be saved by solving all those important, practical ILP problems.
Okay, I had a good background in pure/applied math and in computing and got into ILP for scheduling the fleet at FedEx. Since the promised stock was 1+ years late, I ran off and got a Ph.D., in one of the best programs, in more in hopefully useful pure/applied math, and much of that work was in ILP.
Here is some blunt truth about the NP-complete problems and the cartoon at the beginning of the famous book by Garey and Johnson: The math guys were talking to their manager explaining that they couldn't solve the manager's problem but neither could some long line of other math guys.
Here the blunt part is the meaning of "solve" -- with a computer program running in time only a polynomial in the size of the problem get an optimal solution to any instance of the problem including the worst cases. And here optimal means down to the last penny to be saved. So, for some network deployment by AT&T that was to cost $1 billion, save down to the last penny, in polynomial time, including for the worst case instance of the problem.
Yup, maybe the savings would be $51,937,228.21. And do want to save that last penny. But if the manager would settle for saving just the first $51,900,000.00 in reasonable computer time for all or nearly all the actual instances of the manager's real problem, then there would be little or no difficulty. And should be able to tell the manager that savings of more than $55 million, or some such, were impossible -- that is, have an upper bound.
So, much of the difficulty was saving the last $37,228.21, guaranteeing to do so, for all instances of the problem, including the worst cases.
Well, I can assure readers that should I have insisted on a career saving, e.g., $51,900,000.00 where savings of $55 million were impossible, then I would have spent the last several decades homeless on the streets or dead from homeless on the streets -- no joke.
Bluntly, there just is no significant demand for solving ILP problems in practice. The "managers" don't want to get involved.
Selling pizzas from the back of a truck? Sure -- might sell 100 pizzas a day. Selling solutions to ILP and other NP-complete problems -- f'get about it.
Uh, since there is no significant demand for saving $51,900,000.00 with a bound of $55 million, there stands to be not significantly more demand for saving $51,937,228.21.
Thus, there stands to be no significant value for QC for solving NP-complete ILP problems. Sorry 'bout that. If some people want to get the $51,900,000.00 savings, they've been able to do that for decades and have voted loud and clear "We don't care.".
E.g., in one of my attempts, a guy sent me an ILP problem, we talked, and two weeks later I had running code that in 900 seconds on a slow computer got a feasible solution guaranteed to be within 0.025% of optimality. The problem had 600,000 variables and 40,000 constraints. I had done the work for free. Still, then, suddenly he was not interested.
So be it.
There was another one: I was writing the code using the idea of a strongly feasible basis, and suddenly the customer was not interested and returned to some not very good heuristic code he had.
Better, a lot better, to sell something a lot of people actually want, e.g., a lot better to sell pizza.
And I am doing a startup that to me continues to look good, software running, but it has nothing to do with NP-complete or ILP and wouldn't be helped by QC.
So, to me, e.g., even if Google gets a good QC that can solve ILP problems, then I don't believe that they will have many customers or much of a business and there will be no big reason for IBM or Microsoft to worry.
Since there is no significant demand for using ILP to save money now, I don't see a significant demand for using QC on ILP to save money in the future.
Their employees might be better off selling pizzas. Let's see: From some of my arithmetic about costs of pizza, can do well for $2-3 a pizza. From a pizza truck in a good location might be able to sell the pizzas for an average of $10 each, e.g., an extra $1 for anchovies! Might sell 100 pizzas a day for $1000 a day, maybe 20 days a month. Looks like a better career than QC research!
If there is no demand for pizzas, then there won't be much demand for pizzas with anchovies.
Uh, the Google QC researchers are well paid? Terrific -- park the pizza truck near the Google QC research building!!!!
For some parts of US national security, the situation for a good QC might be significantly different -- I doubt it, but maybe.
Re: The quantum computing bubble
#130This is how I think about it. It's insurance money. If you're a manager of a big company like IBM, Microsoft or Google, you have to align your current product portfolio and future portfolio in such a way that shows your investor that your company will keep growing, even if your current products are stagnant. You can surely say Quantum computing won't do much in next 5 years. But what about 10 years? 20 years? 30 year…
I think you are describing the company dynamics accurately, but I can't help think this is just a terrible way to invest. No party has a concrete plan or vision for how to use it, they just throw money because there is a consensus of good feeling around it. Those good feelings were probably created through academic or corporate marketing efforts in the first place.
> a terrible way to invest. No party has a concrete plan or vision for how to use it, they just throw money because there is a consensus of good feeling around it.
Almost if I were reading about cryptocoins.