Live data from Hacker News

Willow, Our Quantum Chip

blog.google

51–60 of 557 posts

Re: Willow, Our Quantum Chip

#51

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…

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?

Re: Willow, Our Quantum Chip

#53

> Willow performed a standard benchmark computation in under five minutes that would take one of today’s fastest supercomputers 10 septillion years — a number that vastly exceeds the age of the Universe. What computation would that be? Also, what is the relationship, if any, between quantum computing and AI? Are these technologies complementary?

It's in the article. Random circuit sampling benchmark: https://research.google/blog/validating-random-circuit-sampl...

Re: Willow, Our Quantum Chip

#54
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?

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.

Re: Willow, Our Quantum Chip

#55
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?

> 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, a prediction first made by David Deutsch.

That's in line with a religious belief. One camp believes one thing, other believes something else, others refuse to participate and say "shut up and calculate". Nothing wrong with religious beliefs of course, it's just important to know that is what it is.

Re: Willow, Our Quantum Chip

#56

> Willow performed a standard benchmark computation in under five minutes that would take one of today’s fastest supercomputers 10 septillion years — a number that vastly exceeds the age of the Universe. What computation would that be? Also, what is the relationship, if any, between quantum computing and AI? Are these technologies complementary?

[deleted]

Re: Willow, Our Quantum Chip

#57

> 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, a prediction first made by David Deutsch. Processing in multiverse. Would that mean we are inyecting entropy into those other verses? Could we calculate how many are there from the time it takes to do a given calculation? We need to cool the quantum chip in our universe, ho…

What if we are? And by injecting entropy into it, we are actually hurrying (in small insignificant ways) the heat death of those universes? What if we keep going and scale out and in the future it causes a meaningful impact to that universe in a way that it's residents would be extremely unhappy with, and would want to take revenge?

What if it's already happening to our universe? And that is what black holes are? Or other cosmology concepts we don't understand?

Maybe a great filter is your inability to protect your universe from quantum technology from elsewhere in the multiverse ripping yours up?

Maybe the future of sentience isn't fighting for resources on a finite planet, or consuming the energy of stars, but fighting against other multiverses.

Maybe The Dark Forest Defence is a decision to isolate your universe from the multiverse - destroying it's ability to participate in quantum computation, but also extending it's lifespan.

(I don't believe ANY of this, but I'm just noting the fascinating science fiction storylines available)

Re: Willow, Our Quantum Chip

#58

In what ways could Google monetize quantum computing?

Searching through an unstructured data set of size N on a classical computer takes O(N) time

but on a quantum computer, Grover's Algorithm allows such a search to be performed in O(N^0.5) time.

So Quantum Computing, could bring us a future where, when you perform a Google search for a word, the web pages returned actually contain the word you searched for.

Re: Willow, Our Quantum Chip

#59

>the more qubits we use in Willow, the more we reduce errors, and the more quantum the system becomes That's an EXTRAORDINARY claim and one that contradicts the experience of pretty much all other research and development in quantum error correction over the course of the history of quantum computing.

It's really not so extraordinary, exponential reduction in logical errors when the physical error rate is below a threshold (for certain types of error correcting codes_ is well accepted an both theoretical and computational grounds.

For a rough but well-sourced overview, see Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threshold_theorem

For a review paper on surface codes, see A. G. Fowler, M. Mariantoni, J. M. Martinis, and A. N. Cleland, “Surface codes: Towards practical large-scale quantum computation,” Phys. Rev. A, vol. 86, no. 3, p. 032324, Sep. 2012, doi: 10.1103/PhysRevA.86.032324.

Re: Willow, Our Quantum Chip

#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?
Post reply on HN