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Scott’s Supreme Quantum Supremacy FAQ

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Re: Scott’s Supreme Quantum Supremacy FAQ

#201

Post by stuffbyspencer »

codeisawesome wrote: post #162
smsm42 wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The third stage is the hardest. Thermonuclear energy production has been sitting in "theoretically possible, but economically unviable" for decades, tons of technologies like supersonic commercial flight has been achieved and then scrapped because of practical concerns, many other technologies struggle with passing economic viability barrier. Taking that into account, getting from 2nd to 3rd stage would be the hardes…

If you can serve ads any faster with it, you bet it's gonna get deployed to production faster than Nuclear Fusion ever had hope to be :-P

quantum computing dual-state ads doing A/B testing simultaneously... I don't know if any of that just made sense, but I bet you could get some VC funding if you pitched it!

Re: Scott’s Supreme Quantum Supremacy FAQ

#202

Post by muraiki »

jessriedel wrote: post #84
reilly3000 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know what the NSA spends on R&D, but I have to imagine they don't have a multi-billion dollar budget for secret R&D facilities and talent. It would seem more likely they are monitoring developments in public and private research and responding opportunistically. I'm just making assumptions here, but also I don't think somebody with clearance could correct me here in public :P

The NSA has the money and a history of massive secret projects. There are more mathematicians at the NSA than in all of academic cryptography. However, my general impression is that most people don't think the NSA has a secret QC project because there hasn't been a noticeable disappearance of the best young experimental QC researchers from the pipeline like there has been for cryptography. It's the promising people q…

A recent NYT opinion piece from the general counsel of the NSA discusses many of these issues, including quantum computing: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/10/opinion/nsa-privacy.html

Re: Scott’s Supreme Quantum Supremacy FAQ

#203

Post by amai »

It should be mentioned that IBM managed to simulate a 56 qubit version of the same problem Google describes in the paper (see https://pastebin.com/RfUMXJZE) on a classical super computer:

- https://www.ibm.com/blogs/research/2017/10/quantum-computing...

- https://www.newscientist.com/article/2151032-googles-quantum...

So technically Google cannot claim to reach quantum supremancy with only 54 qubits as described in the paper.

Re: Scott’s Supreme Quantum Supremacy FAQ

#204

Post by yters »

khawkins wrote: post #105
yters wrote: post #92

Most major breakthroughs were pretty low tech in origin, and the high tech was all about optimizing the idea. I think we get fundamental research backwards nowadays.

At the very least, we shouldn't be comparing quantum computing to air flight. The Wright brothers were basically hobbyists, incomparable to the global leading technology corporations in the history of human civilization. This seems more comparable to the moon landing or LHC Higgs-Boson discovery. Challenging to pull off once, and the next steps seem to increase exponentially in man-power and cost.

Those haven't really brought us much benefit. The benefit to effort relationship seems to be inverse.

Re: Scott’s Supreme Quantum Supremacy FAQ

#206

Post by erichocean »

jeeceebees wrote: post #176
erichocean wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Now, if you can map some useful computational question onto the original configuration of qubits that is answered by the ending position, you've got yourself a useful quantum computer. This is the hard part! Yes, I agree. But this has not been demonstrated. What's being demonstrated (apparently) is that measuring a quote-unquote "quantum computer" doing whatever it does naturally is easier than simulating said quan…

I think your camera example is a false equivalence that makes this seem as if it's not a computation. The camera is not running the same algorithm as the renderer and so you're comparing different things. The experiment used a classical computer to randomly generate a circuit C, told the quantum computer to execute it, and recorded the result. Then they repeated this but executed each circuit in the most optimal way…

> The camera is not running the same algorithm as the renderer and so you're comparing different things.

[rewriting your words] The experiment used a classical computer to randomly generate a scene C, set that scene up in real life, and recorded the result. Then they repeated this but rendered the scene in the most optimal way a classical computer can. Finally they compared the results to verify that the scene in real life matched the correct classically computed results.

The scene + digital camera has the exact same role (and proof value) in my hypothetical experiment as the quantum computer + measurement device does in the Google experiment.

It's not the camera that "contains the circuit", it's the scene and the camera together that computes the same values (exactly, as it turns out) as the classically computed rendering algorithm of the same phenomena.

Call it "camera computing", write a paper in Nature, win Turing award. The hard part with camera computing is the same: How to map a computation onto the generated scene so that the measurement device (camera) gets a meaningful result faster than it can be simulated in the computer.

----

Look, I've worked on things for a long time only to discover in the end that there's nothing there. It sucks, I get it. Move on, try something else. There's nothing here.

Re: Scott’s Supreme Quantum Supremacy FAQ

#207

Post by erichocean »

reikonomusha wrote: post #199
sanxiyn wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really? I haven't seen any molecular simulation proposal that can be run without quantum error correction. I think if there is such a thing it would count as a breakthrough by itself. Any reference?

There are many, many experiments done simulating molecules, from hydrogen dimers to water. Just one example of many: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1803.10238.pdf

That paper is about using a classical computer to simulate a quantum computing algorithm.

I'm pretty sure OP is talking about an actual, physical, exists-in-reality usage of a quantum computer to do anything meaningful, not theory. There's lot of theory.

Re: Scott’s Supreme Quantum Supremacy FAQ

#208

Post by smsm42 »

moyix wrote: post #181
smsm42 wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The third stage is the hardest. Thermonuclear energy production has been sitting in "theoretically possible, but economically unviable" for decades, tons of technologies like supersonic commercial flight has been achieved and then scrapped because of practical concerns, many other technologies struggle with passing economic viability barrier. Taking that into account, getting from 2nd to 3rd stage would be the hardes…

> Comparing to classic computers, their practical usability has been clear since Babbage time Is this true? I thought that in the 40s-50s there was some argument over whether practical computers could really be built given that vacuum tubes were so unreliable. Von Neumann wrote gave a series of lectures in 1952 (eventually transcribed into an article) showing how it could be done: http://arep.med.harvard.edu/gmc/Von_…

Check out this one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tabulating_machine Yes, not exactly a computer, definitely not a von Neumann one, but close enough to see how such thing would be useful. Also according to Wikipedia, this is the first thing to ever be called "super computing" device. That's what I mean - there's a long history of continuosly improving practical devices that led to the modern computer. For QC, we don't have that history.

Re: Scott’s Supreme Quantum Supremacy FAQ

#209

Post by desert_boi »

riffraff wrote: post #128
desert_boi wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since enormous is from Latin, stems tend to be Latin. `ness` generally only is morphologically productive with Germanic roots, kindness, happiness, etc. When I visited Iceland, I remember a sign in English that said a cliff was insafe [sic]. `in` being a Latin morpheme, and safe being Germanic.

Ah, I never realized in/un would be used with corresponding Latin/Germanic words. But then, it seems there are quite a few un+latin (unreal, unbalanced, unadulterated, uncertain etc), even if I can't think of in+Germanic.

Good counter examples. Etymonline will break roots down for you.

https://www.etymonline.com/word/unbalanced#etymonline_v_2490...

Like most things in linguistics, the 'rules' are more a rule of thumb than the mathimatical sort.

Germanic pre/post fixes seem like they stick to pre-inkhorn roots better.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inkhorn_term

Re: Scott’s Supreme Quantum Supremacy FAQ

#210

Post by jessriedel »

muraiki wrote: post #202
jessriedel wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The NSA has the money and a history of massive secret projects. There are more mathematicians at the NSA than in all of academic cryptography. However, my general impression is that most people don't think the NSA has a secret QC project because there hasn't been a noticeable disappearance of the best young experimental QC researchers from the pipeline like there has been for cryptography. It's the promising people q…

A recent NYT opinion piece from the general counsel of the NSA discusses many of these issues, including quantum computing: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/10/opinion/nsa-privacy.html

Thanks much. For others, here are the relevant bits I could find (my emphasis):

> ...It is by no means assured that our national security sector will be able to attract on a sufficient scale the scarce engineering, mathematical and scientific talent that would supply the necessary expertise. That challenge will require investment, enlightened strategic management and an innovative approach to luring a different type of expert out of the private sector into government. Meeting this challenge will require a greater reliance in general on the private sector, since government alone does not possess the requisite expertise. A large portion of the intelligence community’s experts on the military capabilities and plans of Russia and China joined government during the Reagan administration; other experts on counterterrorism and new technology burnished their technical skills following the Sept. 11 attacks. Many of those experts are nearing retirement or have already left to join an attractive private sector. With millennials believing that technology in the private sector now allows them to help change the world — previously the idea of a mission had been largely the province of public service — it is not clear that the intelligence community will be able to attract and retain the necessary talent needed to make sense of how our adversaries will make use of the new technology...

> ... the government no longer possesses the lead in complex technology, at least in many areas relevant to national security. Arguably, the most powerful computing and sophisticated algorithm development now occurs not in the Pentagon or the N.S.A. but in university research labs and in the Googles and Amazons of the commercial world. (To be sure, the government still maintains its superiority in important areas ranging from nuclear energy to cryptography.)...

> ... our national security agencies for the first time must amass the talent and systems to understand not simply a military challenge but also challenges across a broad range of technology and global finance issues. The capacity for such understanding currently resides principally in the private sector and our universities, not the federal government.

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