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Microsoft doubles down on controversial quantum computing claims

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21–30 of 61 posts

Re: Microsoft doubles down on controversial quantum computing claims

#21
post #11
post #2

When quantum computing becomes mainstream, what will be the first standard programming language? I wonder what the 'C' of quantum computers will be

My prediction would be that it won't become mainstream. Even if it will be practically possible to build quantum computers for average users (given they currently rely on complex physical experiments, one can doubt that), there's the question of whether there's a need for "mainstream" quantum computing. As has often been said, quantum computers aren't some magical thing that makes every computation faster. They are f…

Check out https://quantumvibecoding.org if you want to run some circuits via Claude or codex.

Re: Microsoft doubles down on controversial quantum computing claims

#22

It really looks like they are trying hard to scale a system that is simply explained away by a simpler model... From TFA: The switching behavior they see could just be an electron hopping on and off a quantum dot, perhaps one formed incidentally by part of the wirelike region, Legg says. “This is exactly what you could get from a quantum dot.” I won't pretend I have a deep understanding of any of this, so the only pa…

It sucks to have your work made redundant, so it's hard to understand if their critism is founded or just sour grapes.

Re: Microsoft doubles down on controversial quantum computing claims

#23
post #15
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My prediction would be that it won't become mainstream. Even if it will be practically possible to build quantum computers for average users (given they currently rely on complex physical experiments, one can doubt that), there's the question of whether there's a need for "mainstream" quantum computing. As has often been said, quantum computers aren't some magical thing that makes every computation faster. They are f…

I am reminded of Alexander Bell - one day every city in America will have a telephone!

640 qubits ought to be enough for anybody.

Re: Microsoft doubles down on controversial quantum computing claims

#24
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It can't become mainstream, it is a very narrowly specialized hardware for a very limited set of tasks.

One of those tasks though is "modeling reality".

We can model many "reality" with the classical methods good enough, using Deep Learning and Tensor Network based methods, see for instance - https://quantumfrontiers.com/author/roundsphereblog/ - https://www.quantamagazine.org/key-chemistry-question-answer...

When it comes to many of these systems relevant real world (e.g. quantum chemistry), classical heuristic-based approaches are already successful enough. For instance, you can run one of the simulations in Garnet Chan paper in a 10-15 minutes using some machine similar to DGX Spark to simulate FeMo-cofactor model within accepted quantum chemistry precisions.

I believe its biggest application will be to explore some areas in quantum information (e.g. quantum coherence), all the practical applications will be minor.

Re: Microsoft doubles down on controversial quantum computing claims

#25
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My prediction would be that it won't become mainstream. Even if it will be practically possible to build quantum computers for average users (given they currently rely on complex physical experiments, one can doubt that), there's the question of whether there's a need for "mainstream" quantum computing. As has often been said, quantum computers aren't some magical thing that makes every computation faster. They are f…

> simulating physics (also probably not something average joe wants to do every day) Maybe this will be used for video games at some point? Saying that this will never happen feels a bit like what people were saying about computers when they were filling rooms and cost a fortune, and now everyone has a few of them and finds a lot of uses for them.

It's possible to simulate the classical physics of fairly large game worlds using fairly small classical computer. If you wanted to model it using quantum physics instead (where quantum computers would theoretically have an advantage) said computer would need so many qubits that it would be much larger than the world it's supposed to simulate, while the additional realism would be essentially imperceptible to the player. You'd be better off using analog computing by putting a telepresence robot inside a real-world game arena.

Re: Microsoft doubles down on controversial quantum computing claims

#26
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My prediction would be that it won't become mainstream. Even if it will be practically possible to build quantum computers for average users (given they currently rely on complex physical experiments, one can doubt that), there's the question of whether there's a need for "mainstream" quantum computing. As has often been said, quantum computers aren't some magical thing that makes every computation faster. They are f…

> simulating physics (also probably not something average joe wants to do every day) Maybe this will be used for video games at some point? Saying that this will never happen feels a bit like what people were saying about computers when they were filling rooms and cost a fortune, and now everyone has a few of them and finds a lot of uses for them.

Quantum computers help simulate the unintuitive parts of physics, not those that feel natural to humanst and therefore make sense to include in a game.

Re: Microsoft doubles down on controversial quantum computing claims

#27
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My prediction would be that it won't become mainstream. Even if it will be practically possible to build quantum computers for average users (given they currently rely on complex physical experiments, one can doubt that), there's the question of whether there's a need for "mainstream" quantum computing. As has often been said, quantum computers aren't some magical thing that makes every computation faster. They are f…

> simulating physics (also probably not something average joe wants to do every day) Maybe this will be used for video games at some point? Saying that this will never happen feels a bit like what people were saying about computers when they were filling rooms and cost a fortune, and now everyone has a few of them and finds a lot of uses for them.

[deleted]

Re: Microsoft doubles down on controversial quantum computing claims

#28
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My prediction would be that it won't become mainstream. Even if it will be practically possible to build quantum computers for average users (given they currently rely on complex physical experiments, one can doubt that), there's the question of whether there's a need for "mainstream" quantum computing. As has often been said, quantum computers aren't some magical thing that makes every computation faster. They are f…

> simulating physics (also probably not something average joe wants to do every day) Maybe this will be used for video games at some point? Saying that this will never happen feels a bit like what people were saying about computers when they were filling rooms and cost a fortune, and now everyone has a few of them and finds a lot of uses for them.

Intel 486QX, now with quantum math coprocessor. :p

Re: Microsoft doubles down on controversial quantum computing claims

#29
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> simulating physics (also probably not something average joe wants to do every day) Maybe this will be used for video games at some point? Saying that this will never happen feels a bit like what people were saying about computers when they were filling rooms and cost a fortune, and now everyone has a few of them and finds a lot of uses for them.

It's possible to simulate the classical physics of fairly large game worlds using fairly small classical computer. If you wanted to model it using quantum physics instead (where quantum computers would theoretically have an advantage) said computer would need so many qubits that it would be much larger than the world it's supposed to simulate, while the additional realism would be essentially imperceptible to the pla…

> It's possible to simulate the classical physics of fairly large game worlds using fairly small classical computer.

Not really, almost everything is faked and not really a physics sim. Imagine a world like GTA but every material has realistic deformation and destruction.

I’m not saying quantum computers would be able to do that, but it’s not like current video games are at a point where more compute wouldn’t improve them.

Re: Microsoft doubles down on controversial quantum computing claims

#30
post #11
post #2

When quantum computing becomes mainstream, what will be the first standard programming language? I wonder what the 'C' of quantum computers will be

My prediction would be that it won't become mainstream. Even if it will be practically possible to build quantum computers for average users (given they currently rely on complex physical experiments, one can doubt that), there's the question of whether there's a need for "mainstream" quantum computing. As has often been said, quantum computers aren't some magical thing that makes every computation faster. They are f…

Any kind of quantum workload would live in servers since their capabilities will likely never be latency sensitive. I think what is more interesting is finding a way to utilize the fact that quantum information is capable of traveling faster than the speed of light, obviously observation of the data is bound the same limitations as we have today, but we could scale bandwidth by encoding data and "teleporting" it to the destination greatly increasing throughput, you can think of it as infinite compression. Even more interesting would be to genuinely understand why our universe is able to bind particles like that though since right we know it happens and we can observe it, but we don't really know why or even if it travels faster than the speed of light, but rather we are simply surfacing a derandomized value. This is pretty hard to explain, but if we follow the many-worlds theory we're simply observing an artifact that if we observe value B in the future, we are simply from a universe that had the value B to begin with which means the information never needed to travel at light speed, it was always there.

I think we will find quantum going mainstream in places we least expect, mostly based around derandomization and amplification of data throughput rather than any kind of compute.

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