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Willow, Our Quantum Chip

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Re: Willow, Our Quantum Chip

#241

Post by wasabi991011 »

layer8 wrote: post #195
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 measurem…

> The Schrödinger equation inherently contains a multiverse.

A simple counterexample is superdeterminism, in which the different measurement outcomes are an illusion and instead there is always a single pre-determined measurement outcome. Note that this does not violate Bell's inequality for hidden variable theories of quantum mechanics, as Bell's inequality only applies to hidden variables uncorrelated to the choice of measurement: in superdeterminism, both are predetermined so perfectly correlated.

Re: Willow, Our Quantum Chip

#242

Post by FridgeSeal »

griomnib wrote: post #54
ComputerGuru wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn’t make sense to me because if we can borrow capacity to perform calculations then we can “borrow” an infinite amount of energy.

Climate change solved: steal energy from adjacent universes, pipe our carbon waste into theirs.

There’s a fun short story in qntm’s “Valuable Humans In Transit” about a scenario like this.

Re: Willow, Our Quantum Chip

#243

Post by Nifty3929 »

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?

Try using inverse promises. You get back the result you wanted, but if you don't then send the request the response is useless.

It's a bit like Jeopardy, really.

Re: Willow, Our Quantum Chip

#244

Post by cwillu »

adastra22 wrote: post #186
isoprophlex wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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

Unstructured search is only a √n improvement. You need to find some way for algorithmically significant interference/cancellation of terms in order for a qc to potentially (!) have any benefit.

Re: Willow, Our Quantum Chip

#245

Post by cwillu »

adastra22 wrote: post #234
sheeshkebab wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Search of what?

Anything. Everything. In domains where the search space is small enough to physically enumerate and store or evaluate every option, search is commonly understood as a process solved by simple algorithms. In domains where the search space is too large to physically realize or index, search becomes "intelligence." E.g. winning at Chess or Go (traditional AI domains) is searching through the space of possible game state…

O(sqrt(N)) is easily dominated by the relative ease of constructing much bigger classical computers though.

Re: Willow, Our Quantum Chip

#246

Post by anonymousDan »

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…

Where exactly do you think the idea for a quantum computer came from in the first place?

Re: Willow, Our Quantum Chip

#247

Post by debacle »

riiii wrote: post #131
kridsdale1 wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is how I feel about drones.

They'll be banned for public use in the next 2-3 years. I'm not advocating for the ban, just saying it'll happen.

It's easier to make a "ghost drone" than a "ghost gun." Banning will not be feasible for bad actors.

Re: Willow, Our Quantum Chip

#248

Post by adastra22 »

cwillu wrote: post #245
adastra22 wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anything. Everything. In domains where the search space is small enough to physically enumerate and store or evaluate every option, search is commonly understood as a process solved by simple algorithms. In domains where the search space is too large to physically realize or index, search becomes "intelligence." E.g. winning at Chess or Go (traditional AI domains) is searching through the space of possible game state…

O(sqrt(N)) is easily dominated by the relative ease of constructing much bigger classical computers though.

Uh, no? Not for large N.

There are about 2^152 possible legal chess states. You cannot build a classical computer large enough to compute that many states. Cryptography is generally considered secure when it involves a search space of only 2^100 states.

But you could build a computer to search though sqrt(2^152) = 2^76 states. I mean it'd be big--that's on the order of total global storage capacity. But not "bigger than the universe" big.

Re: Willow, Our Quantum Chip

#249

Post by qnleigh »

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…

You need to distinguish between "physical qubits" and "logical qubits." This paper creates a single "first-of-a-kind" logical qubit with about 100 physical qubits (using Surface Code quantum error correction). A paper from Google in 2019 estimates needing ~20 million physical qubits ("How to factor 2048 bit RSA integers in 8 hours using 20 million noisy qubits" - https://arxiv.org/abs/1905.09749), though recent advances probably brought this number down a bit. That's because to run Shor's algorithm at a useful scale, you need a few thousand very high quality logical qubits.

So despite this significant progress, it's probably a still a while until RSA is put out of the job. That being said, quantum computers would be able to retroactively break any public keys that were stored, so there's a case to be made for switching to quantum-resistant cryptography (like lattice-based cryptography) sooner rather than later.

Re: Willow, Our Quantum Chip

#250

Post by r33b33 »

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…

> Worth spending a little time doing some long tail strategizing I’d say.

What do you mean by this?

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