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Microsoft unveils Majorana 1 quantum processor

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Re: Microsoft unveils Majorana 1 quantum processor

#191

Post by gus_massa »

jlo2365 wrote: post #159
gus_massa wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People working in solid state is weird. [1] For example in some cases they have a "gas" of electrons. It's not a normal gas that you can put in a balloon, it only can live inside a solid. If you ignore the atoms in the solid, in some cases the electrons are free enough to think they are a gas. That is similar enough to a normal gas, and then they just call it a gas. Sometimes the interesting part is a surface between…

Weird. Any good suggestions for further reading on this stuff or is it mostly still academic literature level?

No idea. I read all of that during the Physics courses in the university. The examples are dispersed in a few courses.

I found this video by minutephysics with more details https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KbsnY--LFh0 It's not super technical, but I think it my clarify my explanation and add more details.

Re: Microsoft unveils Majorana 1 quantum processor

#192

Post by goatlover »

m463 wrote: post #140
doitLP wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds exactly like a quantum state itself! It is frustrating to try to unpick the hype and filter the “will never work” from the “eureka!”

you have to open the box to see if the quantum computer is alive or not.

Or the quantum computer is computing which world you open the box in.

Re: Microsoft unveils Majorana 1 quantum processor

#193

Post by mistercheph »

r33b33 wrote: post #188
LarsDu88 wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Beating face verification is quite honestly a far easier thing to break than encryption my friend.

By "face to face" I mean going to bank on your own two legs physically and talking with the teller. Centralized businesses will not suffer much and will switch. Blockchains will get destroyed due to their immutable nature.

Modern banks don't have the personnel bandwidth to physically verify the identity of more than a few tenths of a percent of their customers on a given a day, at that rate it would take them close to a year to physically verify the identities of every customer once.

For example BofA has ~70 million customers, 3,700 retail branches, if each has three tellers at any given time of operation (generous at BofA these days, where you'll usually find one) and is open 8 hours a day, and average time to serve a customer is 20 minutes:

3,700 * 3 tellers * 8 hours * 3 customers / hr = 266,400 customers / business day

70 million / 266,400 customers = 263 business days

Re: Microsoft unveils Majorana 1 quantum processor

#195

Post by hulitu »

ykonstant wrote: post #54
Mistletoe wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI hype is running out of steam, the stock needs quantum power. MSFT is only up 1.99% for the past 1Y.

Hear me out, investors: Quantum Intelligence.

> Hear me out, investors: Quantum Intelligence.

This fits Microsoft. If you know where it is, you surely cannot assess what it can do. /s

Re: Microsoft unveils Majorana 1 quantum processor

#196

Post by hulitu »

jassyr wrote: post #7
kenjackson wrote: post #6

I need HN's classic pessimism to know if this is something to be excited about. Please chime in!

Whenever I read about a scientific breakthrough I login to HN to see what the smart people think about it, and am disappointed if there isn't a post with hundreds of comments.

We are talking about "Microsoft scientific breakthrough" here.

Re: Microsoft unveils Majorana 1 quantum processor

#198

Post by hulitu »

adultSwim wrote: post #94
geodel wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree. Why would I buy Apple M4 macbook when I can have Majorana 1 running Windows 11 and install MS Teams to be extra productive.

They rewrote Teams and it's good now.

Famous last words. /s

Re: Microsoft unveils Majorana 1 quantum processor

#199

Post by andirk »

halosghost wrote: post #179
ogogmad wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As I've mentioned to another commenter, Bitcoin relies only on the existence of an arbitrary DSA. Quantum computing-resistant DSAs have been known since the 1970s. I reckon that swapping out Bitcoin's current DSA with a quantum-resistant one would not count as a major overhaul. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43113682

It would probably require a “hard fork,” which is generally considered to be a major change in the Bitcoin world. All the best,

I am curious as to whether this update would need a hard fork or soft fork. Soft = backwards compatible, meaning nodes on the old code still talk to the network as before, and new nodes have extra features (I think?). This update is adding a layer of complexity to the DSA but not adding a new feature (soft fork) but requiring that the updated DSA be used (hard fork). Maybe allow either to be used in the meantime and then if there is an exploit in the future, we're already half way to consensus on the new fork?

Re: Microsoft unveils Majorana 1 quantum processor

#200

Post by NohatCoder »

jwatson5 wrote: post #186
EvgeniyZh wrote: post #103

I'm doing theorical research in the topological quantum computing. The idea behind topological quantum computing is to utilize quantum materials whose low-energy physics looks like an error correcting code. Since these systems are very large (macroscopic number of atoms), the error rates are (theoretically) very low, ie the qubit is fault tolerant by construction, without any additional error correction. In reality,…

I’m an experimentalist at Microsoft Quantum who was involved in the work presented in our recent Nature publication. As an experimentalist, I can say these results are very exciting and would emphasize that the data are coming from real devices in the lab, not just theories. In the Nature paper, we present data from two different devices to demonstrate that the results are reproducible, and we performed additional me…

It is very hard to take the lot of you serious with press releases that talk about a million qbits, without mentioning what is in the device you built. Your press release seems to be engineered specifically to get misquoted by journalists. You don't have a million qbits, and you most certainly do not have the billions of gates required to utilize the million qbits, that you don't have, meaningfully.

You may claim that I have misunderstood something, all I can say is that that is 100% your fault, because you publish nothing but misinformation.

(That is the plural you, and I really do not care which one of you wrote the garbage, you work as a team and you get judged as a team.)

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