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Google claims to have proved its supremacy with new quantum computer

telegraph.co.uk

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Re: Google claims to have proved its supremacy with new quantum computer

#201

Post by IAmGraydon »

deepburner wrote: post #137

Quantum Computing/Information researcher here. This article is largely garbage, the original (~2 month old) paper is surprisingly readable [0] and I suggest you to check it out. Here's my $0.02: The efforts of the Google team is commendable in that they're trying to squeeze as much out of their noisy systems as possible until error correction is here (they need to, to justify their existence after all) and they are a…

Thanks for your input. Can we all take a moment to recognize what a rare and special corner of the internet HackerNews is? Here we have an article on a highly advanced topic and lo and behold a researcher in the field shows up to add clarity. In a mess of advertising and misinformation that makes up the modern internet, it’s really an island of knowledge and experience that I hope we all truly appreciate.

Re: Google claims to have proved its supremacy with new quantum computer

#202

Post by ted_dunning »

abdullahkhalids wrote: post #87
alpineidyll3 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Note: that there is good physical reasons why the cost of QC may grow exponentially with qbits. Refrigeration is exponentially inefficient as T=>0 and the gap of a quantum system which sets the temperature you must cool to shrinks as you couple new degrees of freedom. This dynamic has been the basic reason for the sub exponential progress in the area (despite exponential expenditure)

Not for photonic quantum computing. Only detectors require cooling, and it is possible to build adequately sized quantum computers with constant number of detectors using loop based architectures. Even more realistic architectures are very very cost effective on the number of components https://quantumfrontiers.com/2023/06/21/what-is-the-logical-...

The terms "realistic" and "cost effective" in the field of quantum mechanics do not have scalar definitions. The meaning changes depending on the problem you are working on and the deadline for funding opportunities.

Re: Google claims to have proved its supremacy with new quantum computer

#203

Post by yummypaint »

bawolff wrote: post #186
pclmulqdq wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With all of the sensationalization, I am now convinced that many of the people in quantum computing itself are grifters, and that funding agencies keep paying them to put pressure on classical computing (despite knowing that QC is a big grift). Already, optimization problems have seen classical "ising" chips get great results (as good as the quantum annealing chips), proving that optimization doesn't actually need tu…

When people are hyping something that is probably still 20 years out, i think its safe to say they are trying to sell you something. Quantum computers will be a real (albeit not earth shattering) advance, but we are still far off. Still rather people pump money here than crypto bs.

Getting research funded is part of the process by which things that are 20 years off actually get developed. People seem to think it's just fated that we will have fusion on X date etc as though it's independent of how much effort is put into it. This kind of research is expensive on an individual scale, but very much a drop in the bucket at the scale of the US national budget.

Re: Google claims to have proved its supremacy with new quantum computer

#204

Post by gopher_space »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #176
mistermann wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm talking about the mind's ability to generate what "is", and "is not". It is a curso no doubt, but it is also sometimes a blessing. But usually it runs unnoticed (or even: denied ) in the background, duffing things up. And when it gets noticed, sometimes really weird things happen.

> And when it gets noticed, sometimes really weird things happen. ....such as? If you have any proof you can probably get a nobel prize.

I was thinking op meant something like realizing everyone has their own take on NULL and none of them are really wrong or right.

Re: Google claims to have proved its supremacy with new quantum computer

#205

Post by Dylan16807 »

mistermann wrote: post #194
Dylan16807 wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And when it gets noticed, sometimes really weird things happen. ....such as? If you have any proof you can probably get a nobel prize.

Everyone "already knows" these things, so no awards or even surprise awaits one.

If you can change bits that have already been observed, that would be very surprising to people.

Otherwise I'm not sure what you mean by "generate" but almost any kind of influence would have massive potential.

Re: Google claims to have proved its supremacy with new quantum computer

#206

Post by cohomologo »

pclmulqdq wrote: post #180
dekhn wrote: post #153

the best thing about watching the entire quantum computing debacle is every time somebody says their QC does something faster than a classical computer, somebody tunes the classical computer to beat the QC. Combined with the fact that chip infrastructure is already paid for and there is a large market to enable economy of scale, coupled with the lack of true problems where exponentially better problem solving is crit…

With all of the sensationalization, I am now convinced that many of the people in quantum computing itself are grifters, and that funding agencies keep paying them to put pressure on classical computing (despite knowing that QC is a big grift). Already, optimization problems have seen classical "ising" chips get great results (as good as the quantum annealing chips), proving that optimization doesn't actually need tu…

In my experience in QC, I've yet to see many grifters. In fact, many of the people in quantum computing are quite open about the fact that we aren't that close to "useful" quantum computing, that the number of practical problems that quantum computers will beat classical computers with could be quite small, and are actively worried about over-hyping. People selling today's QCs as a solver for generic optimization problems are indeed grifting, but that is not most of the community.

Despite all these problems, myself and much of the community still think QC is worth attempting --- for my part, the applications to quantum physics is the main motivation, and one in which it's relatively certain that QC will not "become obsolete". (It's also still perfectly valid to _research_ how to make QC useful in various types of classical problems, including optimization, and it's plausible that progress _could_ be made that would open up more widespread uses of QC. The line, for me, is when people misrepresent the likelihood of success of that research.)

Re: Google claims to have proved its supremacy with new quantum computer

#208

Post by cohomologo »

zerodensity wrote: post #158
deepburner wrote: post #137

Quantum Computing/Information researcher here. This article is largely garbage, the original (~2 month old) paper is surprisingly readable [0] and I suggest you to check it out. Here's my $0.02: The efforts of the Google team is commendable in that they're trying to squeeze as much out of their noisy systems as possible until error correction is here (they need to, to justify their existence after all) and they are a…

Questing regarding error correction and logical qbits. From my very limited understanding logical qbits could mitigate some of the error but uses multiple physical qbits for every logical qbits. Has anyone created a quantum computer that has logical qbits? Say a small one with 16 physical 4 logical qbits quantum computer, or similar.

No, but the quantum groups are making progress towards essentially making 1 logical qubit -- a common scheme uses a square grid of physical qubits, say with size 7x7, 8x8, 9x9, etc.. as a single logical qubit. This may seem like a moving target, but it is not. There is a specific, concrete error rate on the physical qubits, below which it is known that the logical qubits on increasingly large grids get _exponentially_ more accurate. Once the engineering achieves that noise level, logical qubits in the form of NxN grids where N~10-20 will ~eventually~ follow. I won't venture to predict how long, as building and controlling these grids of qubits while keeping the error rate low isn't easy. Could be years or decades.

Re: Google claims to have proved its supremacy with new quantum computer

#209

Post by pclmulqdq »

erikaww wrote: post #177
deepburner wrote: post #137

Quantum Computing/Information researcher here. This article is largely garbage, the original (~2 month old) paper is surprisingly readable [0] and I suggest you to check it out. Here's my $0.02: The efforts of the Google team is commendable in that they're trying to squeeze as much out of their noisy systems as possible until error correction is here (they need to, to justify their existence after all) and they are a…

I'm not educated on QC. But wouldn't Grover's algorithm be very useful? I believe it provides a sqrt(n) time search. For QC to be useful,it just needs to make common utilities very fast. I should look more into QC. It would be cool if it could speed all computation up. I understand there are algorithms that it could execute that a classical composer could not, but I wonder if it could eventually he like just faster h…

To load those bits into your quantum computer, you need to spend O(n) time. Most practical searches are O(n).

Re: Google claims to have proved its supremacy with new quantum computer

#210

Post by bawolff »

api wrote: post #193
bawolff wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that is true, i imagine most people thought it was much more than 10 years away 30 years ago. I think 30 years ago people still weren't sure if it was physically possible at all. In the mean time real progress has been made. If we continue at this rate (big if) we will eventually have quantum computers. Just not tomorrow.

I think it’ll be like AI: perpetually 50 years away until some big discovery is made and everyone stops laughing. For AI it was the “attention is all you need” paper. I’ve been told that for QC it might be error correction that scales but I’m not knowledgeable enough to know if that’s true. I expect that nuclear fusion will follow the same trajectory of being 50 years away until it’s suddenly 0 years away. The realit…

> QC it might be error correction that scales but I’m not knowledgeable enough to know if that’s true

"Error correction that scales" is basically what the definition of a working quantum computer. That is less the breakthrough needed so much as what the breakthrough would lead to.

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