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Are these actually even useful yet? Genuine question. I never managed to solicit and answer, only long explanations which seemed to have an answer of yes and no at the same time depending on who you observe.
My first scan parsed that as "Marijuana 1 quantum processor". Very high performance ...
The people who signed off on this name a) do a lot of drugs or b) didn't notice because they have never come anywhere near weed
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
Microsoft Research entire point is that their approach will allow "fault-tolerant quantum computing architecture based on noise-resilient, topologically protected Majorana-based qubits." Roadmap to fault tolerant quantum computation using topological qubit arrays https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.12252
I'm not proud of my ignorance, and I sure hope that eventually if I get it, it'd be very useful for me. At least it worked like that for monads.
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
As soon as the first practical quantum computer is made available, so much recorded TLS encrypted data is gonna get turned into plain text, probably destroying millions of people's lives. I hope everyone working in quantum research is aware of what their work is leading towards, they're not much better than arms manufacturers working on the next nuke.
- Topological phases of matter (similar, but not identical to the one discussed here) have been known for decades and were first observed experimentally in the 1980s.
- Creating Majorana quasiparticles has a long history of false starts and retracted claims (discovery of Majoranas in related systems was announced in 2012 and 2018 and both were since retracted).
- The quoted Nature paper is about measurements on one qubit. One. Not 100, not 1000, a single qubit.
- Unless they think they can scale this up really quickly it seems like its a very long (or perhaps non-existent) road to 10^6 qubits.
- If they could scale it up so quickly, it would have been way more convincing to wait a bit (0-2 years) and show a 100 or 1000 qubit machine that would be comparable to efforts from Google, IBM, etc (which have their own problems).
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).
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).
Genuinely curious: in what ways is that not a good term? Is it because its not a new thing, just marketing? Or is it conflating with some other physics things?