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Willow quantum chip demonstrates verifiable quantum advantage on hardware

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Re: Willow quantum chip demonstrates verifiable quantum advantage on hardware

#131

Post by adonovan »

AndrewStephens wrote: post #60
lisper wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why wait? Just go read the paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09526-6 In the last sentence of the abstract you will find: "These results ... indicate a viable path to practical quantum advantage." And in the conclusions: "Although the random circuits used in the dynamic learning demonstration remain a toy model for Hamiltonians that are of practical relevance, the scheme is readily applicable to real p…

> "These results ... indicate a viable path to practical quantum advantage" I'll add this to my list of useful phrases. Q: Hey AndrewStephens, you promised that task would be completed two days ago. Can you finish it today? A: Results indicate a viable path to success.

Not quite sure why all the responses here are so cynical. I mean, it's a genuinely difficult set of problems, so of course the first steps will be small. Today's computers are the result of 80 astonishing years of sustained innovation by millions of brilliant people.

Even as a Googler I can find plenty of reasons to be cynical about Google (many involving AI), but the quantum computing research lab is not one of them. It's actual scientific research, funded (I assume) mostly out of advertising dollars, and it's not building something socially problematic. So why all the grief?

Re: Willow quantum chip demonstrates verifiable quantum advantage on hardware

#132

Post by nine_k »

cluckindan wrote: post #128
nine_k wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It means that they transcended the "works on my machine" stage, and can reliably run a quantum algorithm on more than one different quantum computer.

They haven’t, though?

At least they claim that: «Quantum verifiability means the result can be repeated on our quantum computer — or any other of the same caliber — to get the same answer, confirming the result. This repeatable, beyond-classical computation is the basis for scalable verification.» (emph. mine)

But apparently they haven't demonstrated the actual portability between two different quantum computers.

Re: Willow quantum chip demonstrates verifiable quantum advantage on hardware

#134

Post by bobbyprograms »

terminalbraid wrote: post #76
elAhmo wrote: post #13

Definitely not a quantum expert, but I have a feeling that news like this have been happening for more than a decade, without anything usable.

It's what happens when companies are driven by profit rather than making accurate scientific statements that reputation is built by and further research funding is predicated on. Hyperbolic claims like this are for shareholders who aren't qualified to judge for themselves because they're interested in future money and not actual understanding. This is what happens when you delegate science to corporations.

Yeah but let’s be honest they aren’t going to be profiting off this. So maybe to help them feel they are contributing to a good cause

Re: Willow quantum chip demonstrates verifiable quantum advantage on hardware

#136

Post by cma »

amiga386 wrote: post #92
guywithahat wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As with most news, I'll be waiting for Scott Adams to tell me what to think about this

The text adventure guy, or the cartoonist who went batshit?

Aaronson isn't a cartoonist, it was an AI cartoon from ChatGPT that an antisemite sent Aaronson in the mail which he then seemingly maliciously misattributed to Woit making people assume Aaronson went batshit.

https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=9098

Aaronson did work at OpenAI but not on image generation, maybe you could argue the OpenAI safety team he worked on should be involved here but I'm pretty sure image generation was after his time, and even if he did work directly on image generation under NDA or something, attributing that cartoon to Aaronson would be like attributing a cartoon made in Photoshop by an antisemite to a random Photoshop programmer, unless he maliciously added antisemitic images to the training data or something.

The most charitable interpretation that I think Aaronson also has offered is that Aaronson believed Woit was an antisemite because of a genocidal chain of events that in Aaronson's belief would necessarily happen with a democratic solution and that even if Woit didn't believe that that would be the consequence, or believed in democracy deontologically and thought the UN could step in under the genocide convention if any genocide began to be at risk of unfolding, the intent of Woit could be dismissed, and Woit could therefore be somehow be lumped in with the antisemite who sent Aaronson the image.

Aaronson's stated belief also is that any claim that Isreal was commiting a genocide in the last few years is a blood-libel because he believes the population of Gaza is increasing and it can't be a genocide unless there is a population decrease during the course of it. This view of Aaronsno would imply things like if every male in Gaza was sterilized, and the UN stepped in and stopped it as a genocide, it would be a blood libel to call that genocide so long as the population didn't decrease during the course of it, even if it did decrease afterwards. But maybe he would clarify that it could include decreases that happen with a delayed effect of the actions. But these kind of strong beliefs of blood-libel I think are part of why he felt ok labeling the comic with Woit's name.

I also don't think if the population does go down or has been going down he will say it was from a genocide, but rather that populations can go down from war. He's only proposing that a population must go down as a necessary criteria of genocide, not a sufficient one. I definitely don't agree with him, to me if Hamas carried out half of an Oct 7 every day it would clearly be a genocide even if that brought the replacement rate to 1.001 and it wouldn't change anything if it brought it to 0.999.

Re: Willow quantum chip demonstrates verifiable quantum advantage on hardware

#137

Post by rowanG077 »

ortusdux wrote: post #4
einsteinx2 wrote: post #3

> demonstrates the first-ever algorithm to achieve verifiable quantum advantage on hardware. Am I crazy or have I heard this same announcement from Google and others like 5 times at this point?

I'd classify this one as different as it accompanies a publication in Nature - https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09526-6

How is an accompanying publication in nature worth anything in this context?

Re: Willow quantum chip demonstrates verifiable quantum advantage on hardware

#138

Post by seydor »

elAhmo wrote: post #13

Definitely not a quantum expert, but I have a feeling that news like this have been happening for more than a decade, without anything usable.

It's great funding for physics research. I don't care if it's useless, it beats spending on politics and surveillance

Re: Willow quantum chip demonstrates verifiable quantum advantage on hardware

#139

Post by jeffhuys »

portaouflop wrote: post #125
corranh wrote: post #5

Main caveat is that it’s verifiable (by them) but repeatable by others (in principle).

So actually it’s neither verifiable or repeatable in any real-works definition of the words.

This is your second comment in this thread (as far as I’ve scrolled) saying this without an explanation. Could you elaborate on why?

Re: Willow quantum chip demonstrates verifiable quantum advantage on hardware

#140

Post by refulgentis »

fwip wrote: post #119
refulgentis wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Idk. I get this is the median take across many comments, I don’t mean to be disagreeable with a crowd. But I don’t know why using quantum phenomena is a sign something’s off. It’s a quantum computer! But I know something is off with this take if it didn’t strike you that way.

To me, it matters because it's a sign that it might not be particularly transferable as a method of computation. A wind tunnel is a great tool for solving aerodynamics and fluid flow problems, more efficiently than a typical computer. But we don't call it a wind-computer, because it's not a useful tool outside of that narrow domain. The promise of quantum computing is that it can solve useful problems outside the qua…

Good point, I guess that's why I find this comments section boring and not representative of the HN I've known for 16 years: there's a sort of half-remembering it wasn't powerful enough to do something plainly and obviously useful yesterday.

Then, we ignore today, and launder that into a gish-gallop of free-association, torturing the meaning of words to shoehorn in the idea that all the science has it wrong and inter alia, the quantum computer uses quantum phenomena to computer so it might be a fake useless computer, like a wind tunnel. shrugs

It's a really unpleasant thing to read, reminds me of the local art school dropout hanging on my ear about crypto at the bar at 3 am in 2013.

I get that's all people have to reach for, but personally, I'd rather not inflict my free-association on the world when I'm aware I'm half-understanding, fixated on the past when discussing something current, and I can't explain the idea I have as something concrete and understandable even when I'm using technical terms.

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