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Willow, Our Quantum Chip

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Re: Willow, Our Quantum Chip

#181

Post by oldgradstudent »

pandemic_region wrote: post #50

> Willow performed a standard benchmark computation in under five minutes that would take one of today’s fastest supercomputers 10 septillion years — a number that vastly exceeds the age of the Universe. What computation would that be? Also, what is the relationship, if any, between quantum computing and AI? Are these technologies complementary?

> Also, what is the relationship, if any, between quantum computing and AI? Are these technologies complementary?

AI is quite good in producing the meaningless drivel needed for quantum computing related press releases.

Re: Willow, Our Quantum Chip

#182

Post by jumping_frog »

aithrowawaycomm wrote: post #95
jawns wrote: post #8

> It lends credence to the notion that quantum computation occurs in many parallel universes, in line with the idea that we live in a multiverse I see the evidence, and I see the conclusion, but there's a lot of ellipses between the evidence and the conclusion. Do quantum computing folks really think that we are borrowing capacity from other universes for these calculations?

In the same way people believe P != NP, most quantum computing people believe BQP != NP, and NP-complete problems will still take exponential time on quantum computers. But if we had access to arbitrary parallel universes then presumably that shouldn't be an issue. The success on the random (quantum) circuit problem is really a valdiation of Feynman's idea, not Deutsch: classical computers need 2^n bits to simulate n…

Does access to arbitrary parallel universes imply that they divide up the computation and the correct answer is distributed to all of the universes or in such a collection, there will be sucker universes which will always receive wrong answers ?

Re: Willow, Our Quantum Chip

#183

Post by leptons »

deanCommie wrote: post #46

I don't want to judge people by their cover, but I want to confess to having those feelings right now. In this day and age, I feel an immediate sense of distrust to any technologist with the "Burning Man" aesthetic for lack of a better word. (which you can see in the author's wikipedia profile from an adjacent festival -> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hartmut_Neven , as well as in this blog itself with his wristbands…

I know Hartmut Neven personally and professionally, and have for decades. He's not anything like you claim he is. Attacking him for wearing a wristband? That's an ad hominem attack, and not worthy of my time to counter you on.

The fact is that "Burners" are everywhere, nothing about Burning Man means someone is automatically a quack. Your distrust seems misplaced and colored by your own personal biases. The list of prominent people in tech that are also "burners" would likely shock you. I doubt you've ever been to Burning Man, but you're going to judge people who have? Maybe you're just feeling a little bit too "square" and are threatened by people who live differently than you do.

Yes, Hartmut has a style, yes, he enjoys his lifestyle, no, he's not a quack. You don't have to believe me, and I don't expect that you will, but I've talked at length with him about his work, and about a great many other topics, and he is not as you think he is.

Your comment here says far more about you than it says about Hartmut Neven.

Re: Willow, Our Quantum Chip

#184

Post by adastra22 »

JanisErdmanis wrote: post #77
vessenes wrote: post #18

I’m a quantum dabbler so I’ll throw out an armchair reaction: this is a significant announcement. My memory is that 256 bit keys in non quantum resistant algos need something like 2500 qubits or so; and by that I mean generally useful programmable qubits. To show a bit over 100 qubits with stability, meaning the information survives a while, long enough to be read, and general enough to run some benchmarks on is some…

The required number of qubits to execute Shor’s algorithm is way larger than 2500 qubits as the error ceiling for logical qubits must decrease exponentially with every logical qubit added to produce meaningful results. Hence, repeated applications of error correction or an increase in the surface code would be required. That would significantly blow up the number of physical qubits needed.

He’s quoting the number of logical qubits (which is 1024 IIRC, not 2500), after error correction.

ETA: Wikipedia 2330 qubits, but I'm not sure it is citing the most recent work: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elliptic-curve_cryptography#ci...

Re: Willow, Our Quantum Chip

#185

Post by wasabi991011 »

deanCommie wrote: post #46

I don't want to judge people by their cover, but I want to confess to having those feelings right now. In this day and age, I feel an immediate sense of distrust to any technologist with the "Burning Man" aesthetic for lack of a better word. (which you can see in the author's wikipedia profile from an adjacent festival -> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hartmut_Neven , as well as in this blog itself with his wristbands…

> I immediately start to approach the author of this with distrust:

> * He's writing about multiverses

> * He's claiming a quantum performance for something that would take a classical computer septillions of years.

> I'm a layman in this domain

I think your skepticism is well-founded. But as you learn more about the field, you learn what parts are marketing/hype bullshit, and what parts are not, and how to translate from the bullshit to the underlying facts.

IMO:

> He's writing about multiverses

The author's pet theory, no relevance to the actual science being done.

* He's claiming a quantum performance for something that would take a classical computer septillions of years.

The classical computer is running a very naive algorithm, basically brute-force. It is very easy to write a classical algorithm which is very slow. But still, in the field, it takes new state-of-the-art classical algorithms run on medium size clusters to get results that are on-par with recent quantum computers. Not even much better, just on-par.

> Or is this just how technology breakthroughs start (after all the Transformer paper wasn't)

You could say that. It's not truly a breakthrough, but it is one more medium-size step in a rapidly advancing field.

Re: Willow, Our Quantum Chip

#186

Post by adastra22 »

isoprophlex wrote: post #84
vessenes wrote: post #18

I’m a quantum dabbler so I’ll throw out an armchair reaction: this is a significant announcement. My memory is that 256 bit keys in non quantum resistant algos need something like 2500 qubits or so; and by that I mean generally useful programmable qubits. To show a bit over 100 qubits with stability, meaning the information survives a while, long enough to be read, and general enough to run some benchmarks on is some…

Data security okay. But AI? How will that change?

AI is essentially search. Quantum computers are really good at search.

Re: Willow, Our Quantum Chip

#187

Post by adastra22 »

bee_rider wrote: post #171
vessenes wrote: post #18

I’m a quantum dabbler so I’ll throw out an armchair reaction: this is a significant announcement. My memory is that 256 bit keys in non quantum resistant algos need something like 2500 qubits or so; and by that I mean generally useful programmable qubits. To show a bit over 100 qubits with stability, meaning the information survives a while, long enough to be read, and general enough to run some benchmarks on is some…

I think some element of it might be: Shor’s algorithm has been known of for 30 years, and hypothetically could be used to decrypt captured communications, right? So, retroactively I will have been dumb for not having switched to a quantum-resistant scheme. And, dumb in a way that a bunch of academic nerds have been pointing out for decades. That level of embarrassment is frankly difficult to face. And it would be dev…

What would you switch to? There hasn’t been post quantum systems to use until very very recently.

Re: Willow, Our Quantum Chip

#188

Post by LeftHandPath »

wasabi991011 wrote: post #177
LeftHandPath wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Re: AI, it's a long way off still. The big limitation to anything quantum is always going to be decoherence and t-time [0]. To do anything with ML, you'll need whole circuit (more complex than shor's) just to initialize the data on the quantum device; the algorithms to do this are complex (exponential) [1]. So, you have to run a very expensive data-initialization circuit, and only then can you start to run your ML ci…

> I'm curious if EC can mitigate the sub-par decoherence times. The main EC paper referenced in this blog post showed that the logical qubit lifetime using a distance-7 code (all 105 qubits) was double the lifetime of the physical qubits of the same machine. I'm not sure how lifetime relates to decoherence time, but if that helps please let me know.

That's very useful, I missed that when I read through the article.

If the logical qubit can have double the lifetime of any physical qubit, that's massive. Recall IBM's chips, with t-times of ~400microseconds. Doubling that would change the order of magnitude.

It still won't be enough to do much in the near term - like other commenters say, this seems to be a proof of concept - but the concept is very promising.

The first company to get there and make their systems easy to use could see a similar run up in value to NVIDIA after ChatGPT3. IBM seems to be the strongest in the space overall, for now.

Re: Willow, Our Quantum Chip

#189

Post by billti »

goatking wrote: post #51
vessenes wrote: post #18

I’m a quantum dabbler so I’ll throw out an armchair reaction: this is a significant announcement. My memory is that 256 bit keys in non quantum resistant algos need something like 2500 qubits or so; and by that I mean generally useful programmable qubits. To show a bit over 100 qubits with stability, meaning the information survives a while, long enough to be read, and general enough to run some benchmarks on is some…

How can I, a regular software engineer, learn about quantum computing without having to learn quantum theory? > Worth spending a little time doing some long tail strategizing I’d say any tips for starters?

If you're a software engineer, then the Quantum Katas might fit your learning style. The exercises use Q#, which is quantum specific programming language.

https://quantum.microsoft.com/en-us/tools/quantum-katas

The first few lessons do cover complex numbers and linear algebra, so skip ahead if you want to get straight to the 'quantum' coding, but there's really no escaping the math if you really want to learn quantum.

Disclaimer: I work in the Azure Quantum team on our Quantum Development Kit (https://github.com/microsoft/qsharp) - including Q#, the Katas, and our VS Code extension. Happy to answer any other questions on it.

Re: Willow, Our Quantum Chip

#190

Post by cloudking »

codeulike wrote: post #60

They opened the API for it and I'm sending requests but the response always comes back 300ms before I send the request, is there a way of handling that with try{} predestined{} blocks? Or do I need to use the Bootstrap Paradox library?

The answer is yes and no, simultaneously
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