Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Willow, Our Quantum Chip

blog.google

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

191–200 of 557 posts

Re: Willow, Our Quantum Chip

#191

Post by kvathupo »

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?

The bar for entry is surprisingly low, you just need to brush up on intro abstract algebra. I recommend the following:

1. Kaye, LaFlamme, and Mosca - An Introduction to Quantum Computing

2. Nielsen and Chuang - Quantum Computation and Quantum Information (The Standard reference source)

3. Andrew Childs's notes here [1]. Closest to the state-of-the-art, at least circa ~3 years ago.

[1] - https://www.cs.umd.edu/~amchilds/qa/

Re: Willow, Our Quantum Chip

#192

Post by yu3zhou4 »

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?

Did you try staring on your IP packets while sending the requests?

Re: Willow, Our Quantum Chip

#193

Post by aithrowawaycomm »

jumping_frog wrote: post #182
aithrowawaycomm wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ?

Good question! The whole magic of quantum computation versus parallel computation is that the “universe” probabilities interfere with each other so that wrong answers cancel each other out. So I suppose the wrong ”universes” still exist somewhere. But it’s a whole lot less confusing if you view QC as taking place in one universe which is fundamentally probabilistic.

Re: Willow, Our Quantum Chip

#194

Post by softwaredoug »

LeftHandPath wrote: post #180
softwaredoug wrote: post #164

With this plus the weather model announcement. I’m curious what people think about the meta question on why corporate labs like Google DeepMind etc seem to make more progress on big problems than academia? There are a lot of critiques about academia. In particular that it’s so grant obsessed you have to stay focused on your next grant all the time. This environment doesnt seem to reward solving big problems but paper…

I did quantum computing research in university. We did meaningful work and published meaningful research. Around 50% of our time was spent working in Overleaf making small improvements to old projects so that we could submit to some new journal or call-for-papers. We were always doing peer review or getting peer reviewed. We were working with a lot of 3rd-party tools (e.g. FPGAs, IBM Q, etc). And our team was constan…

I wonder what makes research different than product development at a company?

Because in product development, there can be short-sighted industry decisions based on quarterly returns. I've also seen a constant need to justify outcomes based on KPIs etc, and constantly justifying your work, etc.

Re: Willow, Our Quantum Chip

#195

Post by layer8 »

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?

The Schrödinger equation inherently contains a multiverse. The disagreement is about whether the wave function described by the equation collapses to a single universe upon measurement (i.e. whether the equation stops holding upon measurement), or whether the different branches continue to exist (i.e. the equation continues to hold at all times), each with a different measurement outcome. Regardless, between measurements the different branches exist in parallel. It’s what allows quantum computation to be a thing.

Re: Willow, Our Quantum Chip

#197

Post by neoden »

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?

These lessons might be of help: https://youtu.be/3-c4xJa7Flk?si=krrpXMKh3X5ktrzT

Re: Willow, Our Quantum Chip

#198

Post by cherryteastain »

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…

> AI and data security will be unalterably different if so

Definitely agree with the latter, but do you have any sources on how quantum comphters make "AI" (i.e. matrix multiplication) faster?

Re: Willow, Our Quantum Chip

#199

Post by whimsicalism »

justinpombrio wrote: post #167
gaze wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm upset they put this in because this is absolutely not the view of most quantum foundations researchers.

From Wikipedia[1]: A poll of 72 "leading quantum cosmologists and other quantum field theorists" conducted before 1991 by L. David Raub showed 58% agreement with "Yes, I think MWI is true".[85] Max Tegmark reports the result of a "highly unscientific" poll taken at a 1997 quantum mechanics workshop. According to Tegmark, "The many worlds interpretation (MWI) scored second, comfortably ahead of the consistent historie…

i think if these polls were anonymous, copenhagen would lose share. there's a reason why MWI is disproportionately popular among people who basically have no professional worries because they are already uber-distinguished.
Post reply on HN