no shor no upvote
Microsoft unveils Majorana 1 quantum processor
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Re: Microsoft unveils Majorana 1 quantum processor
#82no shor no upvote
Agreed wholesale. Any QC announcement that does not include replicable benchmarks for progress executing Shor or Grover (or demonstration of another real-world use-case that they actually address) should be dismissed out-of-hand by everyone except other researchers in QC.
All the best,
Re: Microsoft unveils Majorana 1 quantum processor
#83Microsoft really is a pathetic company rnd wise compared to what companies of similar size like Bell Labs were at their prime
Re: Microsoft unveils Majorana 1 quantum processor
#84Short Term - This might be hype. Sure. Getting some Buzz.
Long Term - MS seems pretty committed and serious. Putting in the time/money for a long term vision. Maybe a decade from now, we'll be bowing down to an all powerful MS God/Oracle/AI.
Re: Microsoft unveils Majorana 1 quantum processor
#85Whoever 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).
I skimmed through the paper but nowhere did I find a demonstration of a Majorana qubit or a zero mode. The achievement was that they demonstrated a single-shot measurement. That's nice, but where's the qubit? what did I miss?
Re: Microsoft unveils Majorana 1 quantum processor
#86Are 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.
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.
Just like fusion energy it is pointless and you are not allowed to have excitement about it because some anonymous stranger on HN said so.
Re: Microsoft unveils Majorana 1 quantum processor
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
The ideas that underpin their device have been around for some time and aren't called by that name in the literature -- it appears to be entirely a branding exercise. A clear signal to me they don't seriously think it is a good name is that don't use the name outside this article (it appears nowhere in their Nature paper or anywhere else for that matter).
So what is it called then
Re: Microsoft unveils Majorana 1 quantum processor
#88My first scan parsed that as "Marijuana 1 quantum processor". Very high performance ...
I read "Majorana 1 aquarium processor". I am not high.
Re: Microsoft unveils Majorana 1 quantum processor
#89Earlier 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
Based on what i read it seems a lot of algorithmic work is required to even make them useful. New algorithms have to be discovered and still they will only solve only a special class of problems. They cant do classical computing so your NVIDIA GPU probably may never be replaced by a Quantum GPU.
Quantum computing is a generalization of classical computing. Thus, they CAN do classical computing. But, in practice, it'll be not as fast, more error prone and at a bigger cost.
Re: Microsoft unveils Majorana 1 quantum processor
#90A few things to keep in mind, given how hard of a media push this is being given (which should immediately set off alarm bells in your head that this might be bullshit) - 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…
The claim/hope is that topological qubits are fault tolerant or at least suffer from much lower errors (very roughly you can think of topological qubits as an error correction code built of the atoms, ie on scale of Avogadro's number). If, for example they could build a single qubit even with 10^-6 error rates that would in fact put them __ahead__ of all other attempts at the path to fault tolerance (but no NISQ).
It is unfortunately unclear how good the topological qubits practically are.