Is this the new cheat code to get infinite money from governments?
No seriously the amount of cash the our goverments (Canadian here) pumps into projects like this is always annoy me.
Google Quantum AI
121–130 of 210 posts
Re: Google Quantum AI
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
idk enough physics to say quantum computing is it or not intuitively it seems like understanding matter at a sub atomic level and having a machine that can interact with it seems like a super powerful thing to have. but I think quantum computing is in the same place ML was in the 80s; influential people (mainly Marvin Minsky) said the perceptron and neural nets were a dead end same thing could be happening to quantum…
Sure on some level it is extremely interesting and I don't think there is anything wrong with doing research on it. The real issue is pretending that it is something that in the near future will change the world, while having yet to figure what you actually could do with it. IBM and Google have invested massively because someone there thought that it actually would be useful. But that hasn't happened yet and to be ho…
[deleted]
Re: Google Quantum AI
#123The fact this prize exists is admitting that no one has figured out a use for quantum computers. I have heard this mentioned several times in the last decade or so : "The only thing a quantum computer definitively does better than a classical computer is simulating a quantum computer." Whether this capability is useful is up in the air. Note that in practice, classical computers are going to be better at factoring nu…
Ther are plenty of well documented uses for quantum computers, the hardware is just too nascent to fully accommodate them. The most powerful quantum computers today still only have just over 1,000 qbits.
What is the benchmark to have something useful for real-world use in number of qbits?
Re: Google Quantum AI
#124Re: Google Quantum AI
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
From Feynman's 1982 talk on quantum computing: "[N]ature isn't classical, dammit, and if you want to make a simulation of nature, you'd better make it quantum mechanical, and by golly it's a wonderful problem, because it doesn't look so easy." 0. https://s2.smu.edu/~mitch/class/5395/papers/feynman-quantum-...
>and if you want to make a simulation of nature, you'd better make it quantum mechanical That is an absurd claim, if taken by itself. Most of nature relevant to us behaves classically. If you want to do simulations of a building or a car or an earthquake or the climate, modeling it as a quantum system would be absurd.
He's obviously talking about the nonclassical regime, where the fundamental quantum nature of reality matters.
Re: Google Quantum AI
#126The fact this prize exists is admitting that no one has figured out a use for quantum computers. I have heard this mentioned several times in the last decade or so : "The only thing a quantum computer definitively does better than a classical computer is simulating a quantum computer." Whether this capability is useful is up in the air. Note that in practice, classical computers are going to be better at factoring nu…
Quantum computers SHOULD destroy regular computers at knapsack style problems and other combinatorial explosions. The problem there is that decomposing real world problems into 128bit combinatorial selection is really hard.
There's no reason to think that quantum computers will have any fundamental advantage at knapsack problems; the √n advantage from grovers is not substantial when classical computers are going to be many orders of magnitude bigger than quantum computers for the foreseeable future.
If a problem can be reduced to efficiently sampling from the summation of an exponentially large numbers of FFT's, then a quantum computer will destroy a classical computer.
It's largely an open research problem whether there are useful quantum algorithms between those two problem classes.
Re: Google Quantum AI
#127Hilarious. Even the connection between AI and Quantum computing is deeply opaque. When computers first began development during WW2, they were a response to immediate demands for particular functionality from many technical areas. Quantum computing seems to go the exact opposite route, first of building up an (admittedly very interesting) technology and then later figuring out if there actually is anything useful to…
If you read the bio of the head of Google's Quantum Computing (now "Quantum AI") org, you can connect the dots:
Re: Google Quantum AI
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
What does it mean to “simulate” a quantum system and why is that useful
Simulate roughly means designing a quantum computer that mimicks the dynamics of a real quantum system and then run a simulation of that to learn how it would behave under certain conditions e.g. to optimize its parameters. Similar to how we simulate planes or complex circuits today. Quantum systems are everywhere e.g. lasers, cold atoms, transistors or other complex semiconductors, superconductors, enzymes, … I’d sa…
That sounds… wrong.
A simulation of a plane is a model, implemented by humans, of how physics works.
A simulation of a quantum system is still a human implementation of mechanics. A quantum computer per my understanding should not be able to add anything to that. You’re not able to just say well this thingy has quantum mechanics and this is a quantum computer so it’s better able to do that. Quantum computers are about speeding up calculations by structuring specific problems such that wrong answers are not calculated. Not emulating quantum mechanics and then pulling the answer from the ether.
So… what am I missing here? How could quantum computer aided search spaces specifically aid simulating quantum systems that are not quantum computer aided search spaces?
Re: Google Quantum AI
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's not the point. The point is that a lot of discoveries and inventions wouldn't have happened if it weren't for researching just for curiosity's sake. Research results will often be useless for product development or capitalism in general. However, focusing research on achieving specific goals only might actually take you further away from your goals. You can't focus on something you don't know exists, you have…
I agree. I didn't say quantum computing research is useless. My point is that we are not at stage that we can offer a small prize and find monetizable uses for it. Fundamental research requires a lot more funding than this.
> In contrast this effort is trying to imagine and monetize GPS before relativity is discovered.
The theory of relativity was discovered decades before GPS. Similarly, the theory of quantum computing was discovered in the 1990s.
I agree with the sentiment: trying to find applications for a technology (Large fault tolerant quantum computer) that doesn't exist yet. I just think relativity is the wrong comparison. I do not think that this effort if not worth it due to not having fault tolerant quantum computers. Theory alone can take one very far.
Re: Google Quantum AI
#130Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I have heard this mentioned several times in the last decade or so : "The only thing a quantum computer definitively does better than a classical computer is simulating a quantum computer." And, hopefully, other quantum systems in general! I can see that helping with material science. That can have huge multiplier effects on the rest of the economy. But I agree with you, that other serious applications of quantum c…
I thought one of the main advantages of QC was that it could (theoretically) solve existing problems that have exponential time complexity with more efficiency. Isn’t the idea that it could make everything faster? Or did I fall for the marketing.
If a problem can be reduced to efficiently sampling from the summation of an exponentially large number of FFT's, then a quantum computer will destroy a classical computer.
If a task can't be efficiently reduced to such a problem, then a QC probably won't ever help at all; the square root time advantage from grover's algorithm is too easily overwhelmed by simple engineering factors.