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Willow, Our Quantum Chip

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Re: Willow, Our Quantum Chip

#21

Post by klipt »

gaze wrote: post #12
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?

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

Soon: "are alien universes slowing down your internet? Click here to learn more!"

Reminds me of the Aorist Rods from Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy.

Re: Willow, Our Quantum Chip

#22

Post by vhiremath4 »

I really wish the release videos made things a ~tad~ bit less technical. I know quantum computers are still very early so the target audience is technical for this kind of release, but I can’t help wonder how many more people would be excited and pulled in if they made the main release video more approachable.

Re: Willow, Our Quantum Chip

#26

Post by antognini »

gordon_freeman wrote: post #3

So one of the interesting comparisons between Quantum computing vs classical in the video: 5 mins vs 10^25 years. So are there any tradeoffs or specific cases in which the use cases for Quantum computing works or is this generic for "all" computing use cases? if later then this will change everything and would change the world.

There are only certain kinds of computing tasks which are amenable to an exponential speedup from quantum computing. For many classical algorithms the best you get from a quantum computer is an improvement by a factor of sqrt(N) by using Grover's algorithm.

The other tradeoff is that quantum computers are much noisier than classical computers. The error rate of classical computers is exceedingly low, to the extent that most programmers can go their entire career without even considering it as a possibility. But you can see from the figures in this post that even in a state of the art chip, the error rates are of order ~0.03--0.3%. Hopefully this will go down over time, but it's going to be a non-negligible aspect of quantum computing for the foreseeable future.

Re: Willow, Our Quantum Chip

#27

Post by rdtsc »

The main part for me is reducing error faster as they scale. This was a major road-block, known as "below threshold”. That's a major achievement.

I am not sure about RCS as the benchmark as not sure how useful that is in practice. It just produced really nice numbers. If I had a few billions of pocket change around, would I buy this to run RCS really fast? -Nah, probably not. I'll get more excited when they factor numbers at a rate that would break public key crypto. For that would spend my pocket change!

Re: Willow, Our Quantum Chip

#28

Post by fidotron »

The slightly mind blowing bit is detailed here: > https://research.google/blog/making-quantum-error-correction...

“the first quantum processor where error-corrected qubits get exponentially better as they get bigger”

Achieving this turns the normal problem of scaling quantum computation upside down.

Re: Willow, Our Quantum Chip

#30

Post by pitpatagain »

gordon_freeman wrote: post #3

So one of the interesting comparisons between Quantum computing vs classical in the video: 5 mins vs 10^25 years. So are there any tradeoffs or specific cases in which the use cases for Quantum computing works or is this generic for "all" computing use cases? if later then this will change everything and would change the world.

It is specific to cases where a quantum algorithm exists that provides speedup, it is not at all generic. The complexity class of interest is BQP: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BQP

Also of note: P is in BQP, but it is not proven that BQP != P. Some problems like factoring have a known polynomial time algorithm, and the best known classical algorithm is exponential, which is where you see these massive speedups. But we don't know that there isn't an unknown polynomial time classical factoring algorithm and we just haven't discovered it yet. It is a (widely believed) conjecture, that there are hard problems solved in BQP that are outside P.

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