291–300 of 557 posts
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Actually it is exactly based on hypotheses that are verified.
And how do you verify hypothesis? What is the process to do that?
Or is this one of those rhetorical questions?
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It's in the article. Random circuit sampling benchmark: https://research.google/blog/validating-random-circuit-sampl...
Is it really fair to call that "computation"? I am definitely not an expert, but it seems they are just doing a meaningless operation which happens to be trivial on a quantum computer but near-impossible to simulate on a classical computer. To me that sounds a bit like saying my "sand computer" (hourglass) is way faster than a classical computer, because it'd take a classical computer trillions of years to exactly si…
To date all attempt to produce valid claims of quantum supremacy via this channel have failed on closer inspection, and there is no reason to assume otherwise in this case until researchers have had time to look at the paper. There's a number of skeptics in the quantum computing field that believe that this is simply not possible.
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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?
If you're a software engineer, then the Quantum Katas might fit your learning style. The exercises use Q#, which is quantum specific programming language. https://quantum.microsoft.com/en-us/tools/quantum-katas The first few lessons do cover complex numbers and linear algebra, so skip ahead if you want to get straight to the 'quantum' coding, but there's really no escaping the math if you really want to learn quantum…
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Aren't quantum computers expected to be like digitally read analog computers for high dimension optimization problems, and AI is like massive high dimension optimization problems?
Google is betting on digital quantum computers. There are, however, analog quantum computers, e.g. by Pasqal, which hope to capitalize on this to optimize AI-like high dimension optimization problems.
I don't want to judge people by their cover, but I want to confess to having those feelings right now. In this day and age, I feel an immediate sense of distrust to any technologist with the "Burning Man" aesthetic for lack of a better word. (which you can see in the author's wikipedia profile from an adjacent festival -> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hartmut_Neven , as well as in this blog itself with his wristbands…
I know Hartmut Neven personally and professionally, and have for decades. He's not anything like you claim he is. Attacking him for wearing a wristband? That's an ad hominem attack, and not worthy of my time to counter you on. The fact is that "Burners" are everywhere, nothing about Burning Man means someone is automatically a quack. Your distrust seems misplaced and colored by your own personal biases. The list of p…
I picked my words very carefully and I would appreciate if you responded to what I said, not what you think I implied.
I specifically called out - I'm having feelings of bias. That in a field full of quack science and overpromises and underdelivery, I am extraordinarily suspicious of anyone who I feel might be associated with a shall we say "less than rigorous relationship with scientific accuracy". This person's aesthetic reminds me of this.
> The fact is that "Burners" are everywhere, nothing about Burning Man means someone is automatically a quack. Your distrust seems misplaced and colored by your own personal biases. The list of prominent people in tech that are also "burners" would likely shock you. I doubt you've ever been to Burning Man, but you're going to judge people who have? Maybe you're just feeling a little bit too "square" and are threatened by people who live differently than you do.
You couldn't be more wrong. I'm a repeat Burner throughout the 2000's (though it's been a decade), and I've been to a dozen regional Burner events. I know many Burners both in the tech industry and outside of it.
So I actually speak with some experience. I know wonderful people who are purely artists and are not scientifically/technologically inclined - and they're great. I also know deep technologists for whom Burning man is purely an aesthetic preference - a costume not an outfit. Something to pretend to be for a little while but that otherwise has no bearing on their outside life.
And I unfortunately know those whose brainrot ends up intertwining. Crypto evangelists who find healing crystals just as groundbreaking as the blockchain. It's this latter category that I am the most suspicious of, and what I worry when I see a person presented as an authoritative leader in the Quantum Computing domain demonstrate in their external presentation.
I led with an acknowledgement that I am judging a book by it's cover, which one ought to never do. But I think it is worth pointing out because respectability in a cutting edge field is important, lest you end up achieving technological breakthroughs that don't actually change society at all (as already happened with Google Glass).
> You don't have to believe me, and I don't expect that you will,
Why would you expect that I wouldn't?
> but I've talked at length with him about his work, and about a great many other topics, and he is not as you think he is.
That's fantastic to hear! You have direct evidence contradicting the assumptions generated by my first impression. This is all that matters, and all you had to say.
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If you're a software engineer, then the Quantum Katas might fit your learning style. The exercises use Q#, which is quantum specific programming language. https://quantum.microsoft.com/en-us/tools/quantum-katas The first few lessons do cover complex numbers and linear algebra, so skip ahead if you want to get straight to the 'quantum' coding, but there's really no escaping the math if you really want to learn quantum…
Is there a reasonable pivot for someone well versed in the software engineering space to get in, or is it still the playground of relevant Ph.Ds and the like? I've been up and down the stack from firmware to the cloud, going on 14 years in the industry, have a Master's in CS, am the technical lead for a team, yada yada, but have been flirting with the idea of getting out of standard product development and back into…
there's no such thing as a practical QC and there won't be for decades. this isn't a couple of years away - this is "maybe, possibly, pretty please, if we get lucky" 25-50 years away. find the above comment that alludes to "2019 estimates needing ~20 million physical qubits" and consider that this thing has 105 physical qubits. then skim the posted article and find this number
> the key quantum computational resource — are now approaching 100 µs (microseconds)
that's how long those 105 physical qubits stay coherent for. now ponder your career pivot.
source: i dabbled during my PhD - took a couple of classes from Fred Chong, wrote a paper - it's all hype.
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…
The required number of qubits to execute Shor’s algorithm is way larger than 2500 qubits as the error ceiling for logical qubits must decrease exponentially with every logical qubit added to produce meaningful results. Hence, repeated applications of error correction or an increase in the surface code would be required. That would significantly blow up the number of physical qubits needed.
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> I'm curious if EC can mitigate the sub-par decoherence times. The main EC paper referenced in this blog post showed that the logical qubit lifetime using a distance-7 code (all 105 qubits) was double the lifetime of the physical qubits of the same machine. I'm not sure how lifetime relates to decoherence time, but if that helps please let me know.
That's very useful, I missed that when I read through the article. If the logical qubit can have double the lifetime of any physical qubit, that's massive. Recall IBM's chips, with t-times of ~400microseconds. Doubling that would change the order of magnitude. It still won't be enough to do much in the near term - like other commenters say, this seems to be a proof of concept - but the concept is very promising. The…
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The error rates given are still horrendous and nowhere near low enough for the Quantum Fourier Transform used by Shor's algorithm. Taking qubit connectivity into account, a single CX between 2 qubits that are 10 edges aways gives an error rate of 1.5%. Also, the more qubits you have/the more instructions are in your program, the faster the quantum state collapses. Exponentially so. Qubit connectivity is still ridicul…
Re: AI, it's a long way off still. The big limitation to anything quantum is always going to be decoherence and t-time [0]. To do anything with ML, you'll need whole circuit (more complex than shor's) just to initialize the data on the quantum device; the algorithms to do this are complex (exponential) [1]. So, you have to run a very expensive data-initialization circuit, and only then can you start to run your ML ci…
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?