Not the first time that a Nature publication's "too good to be true" results turn out to be based on simple programming errors... Nature 532, 210 (2016) was retracted after it was shown that a hand-coded gradient function, used in gradient descent, had a simple sign error (details in arXiv 2003.05808).
Boffin claims Microsoft’s “quantum leap” is invalid due to “basic Python errors”
51–60 of 64 posts
Re: Boffin claims Microsoft’s “quantum leap” is invalid due to “basic Python errors”
#52Re: Boffin claims Microsoft’s “quantum leap” is invalid due to “basic Python errors”
#53i assumed Boffin was their last name
Not heard "Boffin" used in years.
Re: Boffin claims Microsoft’s “quantum leap” is invalid due to “basic Python errors”
#54Re: Boffin claims Microsoft’s “quantum leap” is invalid due to “basic Python errors”
#55I guess Microsoft upper management doesn't understand anything at all about quantum computing and they are "scammed" by Microsoft research people in quantum computing telling them they are making breakthroughts, that in a few years that can become a real thing, etc. They just need to publish some impressive sounding papers a little bit once in a while and the thing keeps rolling. May be it is just me but when I see a…
>the idea of wave-packet collapse, when a measurement is done, is by itself completely unsound.
It sounds crazy if you read about the math first. Which almost everyone does ... now. But in the lab, if you set up a detector array that reports individual discrete particles arriving one at a time, that is exactly what you see. You just see random arrival times. You don't see a smooth wavefunction that then collapses.
The problem was never to start with the math and try to understand what's happening to a "wavefunction" or how the heck it could possibly "collapse." Instead they started with the crazy experimental results and made math that seems to always fit so far.
Re: Boffin claims Microsoft’s “quantum leap” is invalid due to “basic Python errors”
#56Love the word "boffin". I think we should use "pundit" more often as well.
As soon as I saw this word, I guessed that El Reg was the source.
Guess it went pear-shaped!
> Majorana particles, subatomic particles that scientists have not observed directly.
i expect they're looking for Majorana quasiparticles
Re: Boffin claims Microsoft’s “quantum leap” is invalid due to “basic Python errors”
#57I guess Microsoft upper management doesn't understand anything at all about quantum computing and they are "scammed" by Microsoft research people in quantum computing telling them they are making breakthroughts, that in a few years that can become a real thing, etc. They just need to publish some impressive sounding papers a little bit once in a while and the thing keeps rolling. May be it is just me but when I see a…
>the idea of wave-packet collapse, when a measurement is done, is by itself completely unsound. It sounds crazy if you read about the math first. Which almost everyone does ... now. But in the lab, if you set up a detector array that reports individual discrete particles arriving one at a time, that is exactly what you see. You just see random arrival times. You don't see a smooth wavefunction that then collapses. Th…
The crazy thing to me is that QC is often treated as a normal thing that will come soon, but all we have so far are some crazy experiments we barely understand and some other crazy ideas to maybe build a useful application for calculation with that.
So I applaud all QC researchers and wish them luck. But I start paying really attention once something actually works.
As far as I understand, this is not even like Fusion. Where we knew the basic concept can work 70 years(?) ago, but still fail to build a workable power plant today, because it is just incredibly hard. And we don't know if we ever can make it work economical. But with quantum computers we don't even know whether it can work for practical applications besides quantum research at all - at least this is my understanding.
Re: Boffin claims Microsoft’s “quantum leap” is invalid due to “basic Python errors”
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
>the idea of wave-packet collapse, when a measurement is done, is by itself completely unsound. It sounds crazy if you read about the math first. Which almost everyone does ... now. But in the lab, if you set up a detector array that reports individual discrete particles arriving one at a time, that is exactly what you see. You just see random arrival times. You don't see a smooth wavefunction that then collapses. Th…
The crazy thing to me is that QC is often treated as a normal thing that will come soon, but all we have so far are some crazy experiments we barely understand and some other crazy ideas to maybe build a useful application for calculation with that. So I applaud all QC researchers and wish them luck. But I start paying really attention once something actually works. As far as I understand, this is not even like Fusio…
There are some objections/worries on the grounds of 'is reality fundamentally quantum or is there some other model that is classical and means QC doesn't work'. But it's also worth distinguishing the different approaches that are being used. Other QC computers are doing actual calculations, just not ones that demonstrably beat classical computers for practical applications, and if the whole concept works then there is a threshold where quantum error correction can take the whole thing from 'doesn't scale anything but the most trivial examples' to 'relevant for cryptography' in a relatively short time period.
Microsoft's approach, however, is a bit of a maverick one even within QC: what's in contention here is whether they've even made a single qubit, something other quantum computers have demonstrated conclusively (the difficult part being doing operations on those qubits with low enough noise to be able to achieve error correction).
Re: Boffin claims Microsoft’s “quantum leap” is invalid due to “basic Python errors”
#59Re: Boffin claims Microsoft’s “quantum leap” is invalid due to “basic Python errors”
#60Was pleasantly surprised to see the exact bug in here, in a "The Register" article of all places. Legg showed that fixing the bug invalidates the research. Seems Microsoft is responding to a clear problem with a vague dismissal. Edit: Oh, The Register is a true tech paper, guess the name makes sense for that. Got mixed up cause there are a bunch of general papers called something Register.
Even without this, the whole thing was snake oil from the start, and this was pointed out by a number of researchers at the time. If you need to invent a new form of physics to make your claims work then there's something very fishy going on.