• Optional@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    Check it, yo. In the 90s all the articles and rumors around quantum computing were exactly the same. Exactly.

    Whenever I hear about some new quantum computing breakthrough, I spend about five seconds wondering if it’s real and then I feel very nostalgic because no, it never is.

      • Optional@lemmy.world
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        2 hours ago

        Sure, sure and it’s interesting stuff. But not anywhere near useful in the sense people mean when they talk about computers.

        • daniskarma@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          4 minutes ago

          They are as useful as the Large Hadron Collider, or the New Horizons probe.

          They are instruments of practical scientific research. They may have some return in useful technology or not, but science is always worth it.

    • SmoothOperator@lemmy.world
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      14 hours ago

      Except quantum computers do indeed exist right now, and did not in the 90’s. Sadly, the hype and corporate interests still make it difficult to tell truth from nonsense.

      • Optional@lemmy.world
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        2 hours ago

        Yeah, sure they exist. Much like the ENIAC. And it’s cool stuff to work with. It’s just not anywhere close to practical. And it never has been.

    • Pacattack57@lemmy.world
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      22 hours ago

      If you had asked someone in the 90s if they could imagine half the shit that we have technologically they wouldn’t believe it. Just because something seems surreal, doesn’t mean it’s fake.

      Whether this new chip can do the things it claims we’ll see soon enough.

        • Couldbealeotard@lemmy.world
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          47 minutes ago

          The ideas have always been there, it’s just a bottle neck on cheap electronics and people figuring out the foundation technology. I can’t think of to many tech advancements that have surprised me; that’s not too say they aren’t impressive, but just about anything we can imagine is possible.

          The main thing I don’t expect to see is useful and reliable brain/electronics interfaces. I think biology is too unique for an of the shelf product to be possible, which means it’s too hard to make a profitable product.

  • cabbage@piefed.social
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    1 day ago

    This is a piece of alleged technology that is based on basic physics that has not been established.

    That does sound like a problem.

      • SmoothOperator@lemmy.world
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        13 hours ago

        Prime factorisation is indeed nobody’s primary idea of what a quantum computer will be useful for in practice any time soon, but it cannot be denied that Shor’s algorithm is the first and only method of prime factorisation we have discovered which can finish in realistic time with realistic resources.

        And that means that RSA is no longer as safe as it once was, justifying the process of finding alternatives.

          • SmoothOperator@lemmy.world
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            8 hours ago

            Indeed I did. They seem to be pointing to the fact that current machines are not factoring primes in any serious way.

            Does this contradict my point?

    • Buelldozer@lemmy.today
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      1 day ago

      We should find out next week at APS Global if it’s really a problem or a case of Physicist Sergey Frolov, the author of that quote, failing to understand what’s been done.

      Microsoft could be full of shit about Majorana 1 of course but it would be damned odd for them to make a claim like this without being able to back it up; the fallout would be horrendous.

      • Gerudo@lemm.ee
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        1 day ago

        I have to agree with this. Say what you will about MS, but it’d be odd to claim something this crazy that they can’t at least sorta backup.

  • Ace T'Ken@lemmy.ca
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    1 day ago

    Yeah, most quantum science at the moment is largely fraudulent. It’s not just Microsoft. It’s being developed because it’s being taught in business schools as the next big thing, not because anybody has any way to use it.

    Any of the “quantum computers” you see in the news are nothing more than press releases about corporate emulators functioning how they think it might work if it did work, but it’s far too slow to be used for anything.

    • SmoothOperator@lemmy.world
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      14 hours ago

      Quantum science is not fraudulent, incredible leaps are being made with the immense influx of funding.

      Quantum industry is a different beast entirely, with scientific rigour being corrupted by stock price management.

      It’s an objective fact that quantum computers indeed exist now, but only at a very basic prototype level. Don’t trust anything a journalist says about them, but they are real, and they are based on technology we had no idea if would ever be possible.

      • Ace T'Ken@lemmy.ca
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        4 hours ago

        Well, I love being wrong! Are you able to show a documented quantum experiment that was carried out on a quantum computer (and not an emulator using a traditional architecture)?

        How about a use case that isn’t simply for breaking encryption, benchmarking, or something deeply theoretical that they have no way to know how to actually program for or use in the real world?

        I’m not requesting these proofs to be snarky, but simply because I’ve never seen anything else beyond what I listed.

        When I see all the large corporations mentioning the processing power of these things, they’re simply mentioning how many times they can get an emulated tied bit to flip, and then claiming grandiose things for investors. That’s pretty much it. To me, that’s fraudulent (or borderline) corporate BS.

        • SmoothOperator@lemmy.world
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          3 minutes ago

          Hell yes! I’d love to share some stuff.

          One good example of a quantum computer is the Lukin group neutral atoms work. As the paper discusses, they managed to perform error correction procedures making 48 actual logical qubits and performing operations on them. Still not all that practically useful, but it exists, and is extremely impressive from a physics experiment viewpoint.

          There are also plenty of meaningful reports on non-emulated machines from the corporate world. From the big players examples include the Willow chip from Google and Heron from IBM being actual real quantum devices doing actual (albeit basic) operations. Furthermore there are a plethora of smaller companies like OQC and Pasqal with real machines.

          On applications, this review is both extensive and sober, outlining the known applications with speedups, costs and drawbacks. Among the most exciting are Fermi-Hubbard model dynamics (condensed matter stuff), which is predicted to have exponential speedup with relatively few resources. These all depend on a relatively narrow selection of tricks, though. Among interesting efforts to fundamentally expand what tricks are available is this work from the Babbush group.

          Let me know if that’s not what you were looking for.

    • MagicShel@lemmy.zip
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      1 day ago

      I just saw on Linked In that in 12 months “quantum AI” is going to be where it’s at. Uh… really? Do I hear “crypto-quantum AI?”

    • dylanmorgan@slrpnk.net
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      1 day ago

      It’s…not shocking exactly, but a little surprising and a lot disappointing that so much of finance is now targeted at “let’s make a thing that we read about in sci fi novels we read as kids.”

      Focusing on STEM and not the humanities means we have a bunch of engineers who think “book thing cool” and have zero understanding of how allegory works.

      • pycorax@lemmy.world
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        21 hours ago

        Most competent engineers don’t think that. They know and understand the limitations of what they’re working on. They just do it because the finance bros pay.

      • anomnom@sh.itjust.works
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        22 hours ago

        Elno has just reinforced that if you lie enough to become a billionaire, that the market will reward you for YEARS. Possibly forever of you don’t let them find out your a power hungry amazing who want to ruin the whole country.

  • MonkderVierte@lemmy.ml
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    14 hours ago

    a breakthrough type of material which can observe and control Majorana particles to produce more reliable and scalable qubits

    To… produce a more random random numbers generator?

    • Ogmios@sh.itjust.works
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      1 day ago

      You can tell that someone is lying about their work in quantum physics when they claim to understand quantum physics.

  • Treczoks@lemmy.world
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    3 hours ago

    Of course. Not a single quantum computer has done anything but test programs and quantum-specific benchmarks. Until a quantum computer finally does something a normal computer regularly does, but faster, we should simply ignore this area.

    EDIT: could the downvoters state a single occasion where a quantum computer outmatched a normal computer on a real problem. And with that I mean something more elaborate than winning naughts and crosses, or something like that.

    • MonkderVierte@lemmy.ml
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      14 hours ago

      That’s a different kind of quantum computer though (which i call the “real” kind). But that needs a while, especially with current risk-avoiding behavior of big corp. We are not even optical yet, not to talk about multitalents like graphene/silicene.

    • Lv_InSaNe_vL@lemmy.world
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      1 day ago

      until it’s better we should simply ignore this

      That seems like a strange comment to make. How will it get better if we don’t spend the time and effort to make it better?