Link to the actual article: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-08449-y
and the arXiv preprint, which isn't paywalled https://arxiv.org/html/2408.13687v1
And contains more information, figures, and lots of supplementary material.
Willow, Our Quantum Chip
511–520 of 557 posts
Re: Willow, Our Quantum Chip
#512Take the announcement with a grain of salt. From German physicist Sabine Hoffenfelder: > The particular calculation in question is to produce a random distribution. The result of this calculation has no practical use. > > They use this particular problem because it has been formally proven (with some technical caveats) that the calculation is difficult to do on a conventional computer (because it uses a lot of entang…
TBH you need to take the youtube influencer Sabine Hoffenfelder with a bigger grain of salt. She has converted to mainly posting clickbait youtube stuff over the last years (unfortunately, she was interesting to listen to earlier). The RCS is a common benchmark with no practical value, as is stated several times in the blog announcement as well. It's used because if a quantum computer can't do that, it can't do any o…
she was right the first time when they announced this in 2019 and this time even they admit in their own press release:
> Of course, as happened after we announced the first beyond-classical computation in 2019, we expect classical computers to keep improving on this benchmark
As IBM showed their estimate of classical computer time is taken out of their a**es.
Re: Willow, Our Quantum Chip
#513I 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 know Hartmut Neven personally and professionally, and have for decades
I don't want to put you on the spot too much, but can you speak to why he included the part about many-worlds in this blog post?
I don't know enough about Google to say if maybe someone else less technical wrote that, or if he is being pressured to put sci-fi sounding terms in his posts, or if he believes Google's quantum computer is actually testing many-worlds, or some other reason I can't think of.
Re: Willow, Our Quantum Chip
#514> 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 quantum computer idea was literally invented by David Deutsche to test the many universes theory of quantum physics.
It is not useful to spam this comment repeatedly under different people who question or disagree with many worlds. Pick one place to make your case.
Re: Willow, Our Quantum Chip
#515The slightly mind blowing bit is detailed here: > https://research.google/blog/making-quantum-error-correction... “the first quantum processor where error-corrected qubits get exponentially better as they get bigger” Achieving this turns the normal problem of scaling quantum computation upside down.
Hmm why? I thought the whole idea was this would work eventually. Physical qubit vs logical qubit distinction is there already for a long time. The scaling problem is multifaceted. IMHO the physical qubits are the biggest barrier to scaling.
> Hmm why?
In theory, theory and practice are the same.
Re: Willow, Our Quantum Chip
#516Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes this is deeply unserious tangent in supposedly landmark technology announcement.
It's just marketing.
"Just marketing" in science journalism and publications is basically at the root of the anti-intellectualism movement right now (other than the standard hyper-fundamentalist Christians that need to convince people that science in general is all fraud), everyone sees all these wild claims and conclusions made by "science journalists" with zero scientific training and literal university PR departments that are trivially disproved in the layman's mind simply by the fact that they don't happen, and they lose faith not in the journalists who have no idea what they are writing about, but in science itself
I used to love Popular Science magazine in middle school, but by high school I had noticed how much it's claims were hyperbole and outright nonsense. I can't fathom how or why, but most people blame the scientists for it.
Puffery is not a victimless crime.
Re: Willow, Our Quantum Chip
#517Earlier quoted context omitted.
Surely it would depend on what the simulation actually was? If you imagine simulations we can build ourselves, such as video games, it's not hard to add something at the edge of the map that users are prevented from reaching and have the code send "this thing is massive and powerful" data to the players. Who's to say that the simulation isn't actually focussed on earth, and everything including the sun is actually ju…
The common trait that all hypothetical high-fidelity simulated universes possess is the ability to produce high-fidelity simulated universes. And since our current world does not possess this ability, it would mean that either humans are in the real universe, and therefore simulated universes have not yet been created, or that humans are the last in a very long chain of simulated universes, an observation that makes…
>The common trait that all hypothetical high-fidelity simulated universes possess is the ability to produce high-fidelity simulated universes.
Where have you seen this?
Re: Willow, Our Quantum Chip
#518Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have observed the change in approach to use aggressive (clickbaity) thumbnails, but I do think the quality of the content has not changed. And I can't blame her for adopting this trend, in many cases it is the difference between surviving or not on YouTube nowadays.
How would she not survive on YouTube? Would they block her posts if she didn't use a misleading title and thumbnail (shout-out to dearrow for those who despise this practice)?
>Would they block her posts if she didn't use a misleading title and thumbnail
So, the way youtube works is that every single creator is in an adversarial competition for your attention and time. More content is uploaded than can be consumed (profitably, from Youtube's point of view). Every video you watch is a "victory" for that video's creator, and a loss for many others.
Every single time youtube shows you a screen full of thumbnails, it's running a race. Whichever video you pick will be shown to more users, while the videos you don't pick get punished and downranked in the algorithm. If a Youtube creator's video is shown to enough people without getting clicked on, ie has a low clickthrough rate, it literally stops being shown to people.
Youtube will even do this to channels you have explicitly subscribed to, which they barely use as a signal for recommendations nowadays.
Every single creator has said that clickbait thumbnails have better performance than otherwise. If other creators are using clickbait thumbnails, you will be at a natural disadvantage if you do not. There are not enough users who hate clickbait to drive any sort of signal to the algorithm(s).
If you as a creator have enough videos in a row that do not do well, you will find your entire channel basically stops getting recommended.
It's entirely a tragedy of the commons problem: If every user stopped simultaneously, nobody would suffer, but any defectors would benefit, so they won't stop simultaneously.
Youtube itself could trivially stop this, but in reality they love it, because they have absolutely run tests, and clickbait thumbnails drive more engagement than normal thumbnails. This is why they provide ample tooling to creators to A/B test thumbnails, help make better clickbait etc, and zero tooling around providing viewers a way to avoid clickbait thumbnails, which would be trivial to provide as an "alternative thumbnail" setting for creators and viewers.
Sabine is literally driving herself down an anti-science echochamber though. Maybe she can't see it, but it's very clear from the outside what is happening. She has literally said that "90% of the science that your tax dollars pay for is bullshit" which is absurd hyperbole, and something that a PHYSICIST cannot say about all fields full stop. It's literally https://xkcd.com/793/
Re: Willow, Our Quantum Chip
#519They 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?
> I'm sending requests but the response always comes back 300ms before I send the request
Ah. Newbie mistake. You need to turn OFF your computer and disconnect from the network BEFORE sending the request. Without this step you will always receive a response before the request is issued.
Re: Willow, Our Quantum Chip
#520Earlier quoted context omitted.
The common trait that all hypothetical high-fidelity simulated universes possess is the ability to produce high-fidelity simulated universes. And since our current world does not possess this ability, it would mean that either humans are in the real universe, and therefore simulated universes have not yet been created, or that humans are the last in a very long chain of simulated universes, an observation that makes…
>The common trait that all hypothetical high-fidelity simulated universes possess is the ability to produce high-fidelity simulated universes. Where have you seen this?
https://youtu.be/pmcrG7ZZKUc?t=220
If we're a simulation of a parent universe that is exactly like us just of it's past or an alternate past, then we likely should be able to achieve simulating our own universe within ourselves. Otherwise we're not actually a simulation.
There's another line of counter argument that various results in QM and computing theory would suggest that it's mathematically impossible for the universe to be simulated on a computer (i.e. the parent universe would have to look very different from ours vs ours in the future). But I don't recall the arxiv paper.