61–70 of 200 posts
This is why I'm more excited about Microsoft than Apple.
Agree. Why would I buy Apple M4 macbook when I can have Majorana 1 running Windows 11 and install MS Teams to be extra productive.
I need HN's classic pessimism to know if this is something to be excited about. Please chime in!
I work in the field. While all players are selling a dream right now, this announcement is even more farcical. Majoranas are still trying to get to the point where they have even one qubit that could be said to exist and whose performance can be quantified. The majorana approach (compared with more mature technologies like superconducting circuits or trapped ions) is a long game, where there are theoretical reasons t…
Can someone check my understanding: does this mean they have eight logical qubits on the chip? It appears that way from the graphic where it zooms into each logical qubit, although it only shows two there. If that is true, it sounds like having a plan to scale to millions of logical qubits on a chip is even more impressive.
They have never demonstrated even a single physical qubit. Microsoft has claimed for a while to have observed some signatures of quantized Majorana conductance which might potentially allow building a qubit in the future. However, other researches in the field have strongly criticized their analysis, and the field is full of retracted papers and allegations of scientific misconduct.
Roadmap to fault tolerant quantum computation using topological qubit arrays https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.12252
From a casual observer, it seemed like Microsoft's Majorana approach had hit a wall a few years back when there were retractions by the lead researchers. I wonder what's changed? https://cacm.acm.org/news/majorana-meltdown-jeopardizes-micr...
> I wonder what's changed? Maybe I'm too cynical, but I suspect pressure from leadership to package whatever they had in vague language and ambiguous terms to create marketing copy that makes it appear the team is doing amazing work even though in two years we'll still be in roughly the same place we are today wrt quantum computing. Reading through the announcement I see lots of interesting sounding ideas and claims…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
No. The long explanations boil down to this: quantum computers ( so far ) are better ( given a million qubits ) than classical computers at ( problems that are in disguise ) simulating quantum computers.
given a million qubits ... also last time I checked the record was 80 qubits and with every doubling of the cubits the complexity of the system and the impurities and the noise are increasing. so it's even questionable whether there will ever be useful quantum computers
"fault-tolerant quantum computing architecture based on noise-resilient, topologically protected Majorana-based qubits."
From a casual observer, it seemed like Microsoft's Majorana approach had hit a wall a few years back when there were retractions by the lead researchers. I wonder what's changed? https://cacm.acm.org/news/majorana-meltdown-jeopardizes-micr...
> In fact, there was some controversy over the first attempts to do so, with an early paper having been retracted after a reanalysis of its data showed that the evidence was weaker than had initially been presented. A key focus of the new Nature paper is providing more evidence that Majorana zero modes really exist in this system.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2025/02/microsoft-builds-its...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
No. The long explanations boil down to this: quantum computers ( so far ) are better ( given a million qubits ) than classical computers at ( problems that are in disguise ) simulating quantum computers.
given a million qubits ... also last time I checked the record was 80 qubits and with every doubling of the cubits the complexity of the system and the impurities and the noise are increasing. so it's even questionable whether there will ever be useful quantum computers
What do they mean by >can create an entirely new state of matter – not a solid, liquid or gas but a topological state
Whoever decided to make up the non-existent term "topoconductor" for the purposes of this article deserves to feel shame and embarassment (I say this as a condensed matter physicist).