11–20 of 104 posts
Important Nuance: the research is real, the science is real, but the narrative being sold about the future of quantum computing to ensnare investors is not a reasonable prediction and is a con.
> Researchers like Jaime Sevilla and Jess Riedel support this timeline, publishing a report in late 2020 that claimed a 90% confidence of RSA-2048 being factored before 2060. I am skeptical. 36 years is a long time, but in the past 10 years there hasn't been much progress: year 2001: factorization of 15 (IBM) year 2012: factorization of 21 (University of Bristol) year 2019: factorization of 35 attempt, failed (IBM) h…
IIRC none of those uses of shor's algorithm were real (well maybe the 2019 one was, but that failed). There's a threshold you need to reach for quantum error correction to work and we are approaching it pretty steadily on a log scale.
The linked paper touches on quantum error correction but doesn't explain what the state of the art is. Has any team successfully demonstrated a single usable logical error-corrected qubit yet? I saw this article two months ago https://physicsworld.com/a/why-error-correction-is-quantum-c... discussing the topic, but the writing makes it unclear exactly what was achieved by the various groups. Is recovery from a finite…
I think this is the SOTA https://s7d9.scene7.com/is/content/quantum/LQ_ErrorCorrectio... the corrections significantly decrease the error rate but they need to do a lot of preselection, so it isn't quite useful yet.
The article suffers from skipping between layers of abstraction in an attempt to make a point, and in the end in doing so fails to make the initial point. In the first "Myth" section, that "nobody understands this quantum stuff", the example is used of the transistor. It's true that we have no way of making a classical model of a transistor, and our understanding of how transistors work relies on quantum mechanics. B…
> The final section was of particular interest to me; Gil Kalai's work on quantum error correction is very interesting to me and I am in the camp that believes that quantum computing is not possible in any useful sense; in particular a quantum computer will not be capable of being significantly more powerful than a classical computer, in the quantum supremacy sense. My question too. I've had a vague feeling about thi…
Why? Cooling a large object is not exponentially harder than cooling a small object.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think this is the SOTA https://s7d9.scene7.com/is/content/quantum/LQ_ErrorCorrectio... the corrections significantly decrease the error rate but they need to do a lot of preselection, so it isn't quite useful yet.
Thanks! If I'm reading that correctly, their best error rate with pre and post selection is 0.03%, but they end the paper with the statement "A significant milestone will be to demonstrate a universal family of quantum circuits with logical error rates approaching 10^−8." Seems like we're still six orders of magnitude off.
> Researchers like Jaime Sevilla and Jess Riedel support this timeline, publishing a report in late 2020 that claimed a 90% confidence of RSA-2048 being factored before 2060. I am skeptical. 36 years is a long time, but in the past 10 years there hasn't been much progress: year 2001: factorization of 15 (IBM) year 2012: factorization of 21 (University of Bristol) year 2019: factorization of 35 attempt, failed (IBM) h…
The article suffers from skipping between layers of abstraction in an attempt to make a point, and in the end in doing so fails to make the initial point. In the first "Myth" section, that "nobody understands this quantum stuff", the example is used of the transistor. It's true that we have no way of making a classical model of a transistor, and our understanding of how transistors work relies on quantum mechanics. B…
tl;dr Experts in a domain are extremely poor at predicting the impact of a technology disruptive to their domain. It's not that they are trying to be dishonest. Just that there are too many fallacies waiting to trap them and they inevitably fall prey to one or more of them.
The article suffers from skipping between layers of abstraction in an attempt to make a point, and in the end in doing so fails to make the initial point. In the first "Myth" section, that "nobody understands this quantum stuff", the example is used of the transistor. It's true that we have no way of making a classical model of a transistor, and our understanding of how transistors work relies on quantum mechanics. B…
Maybe his arguments have improved over the decades. Does he now have a coherent argument that doesn't (i) take it as a point of religious faith that noise will be magically correlated in order to break error correcting codes (ii) also demonstrate the impossibility of classical computers
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The final section was of particular interest to me; Gil Kalai's work on quantum error correction is very interesting to me and I am in the camp that believes that quantum computing is not possible in any useful sense; in particular a quantum computer will not be capable of being significantly more powerful than a classical computer, in the quantum supremacy sense. My question too. I've had a vague feeling about thi…
>It must get exponentially harder per qbit to eliminate thermal noise by cooling down closer to absolute zero Why? Cooling a large object is not exponentially harder than cooling a small object.
Per unit of volume, your body produces more heat than the sun, exactly because it is an exponential function.