Quantum Computer Makers Like Their Odds For Big Progress (cnet.com) 31
For years, quantum computing has been the preserve of academics. New advances, however, are pushing this potentially revolutionary technology toward practical applications. From a report: At the Q2B conference this month, quantum computer makers Google, IBM, Honeywell, IonQ and Xanadu detailed specific steps they expect by 2024 that will push their machines further down the road of commercial practicality. Those achievements include increasing quantum computers' scale, performance and reliability. Private sector spending on quantum computing products and services will likely more than triple to $830 million in 2024, up from $250 million in 2019, according to a forecast from Hyperion Research.
"We're in the early industrial era of quantum computing," said Seth Lloyd, an MIT professor who helped found the field in the 1990s. He says the "huge advances" are comparable to the early use of steam engines to power factories, ships and trains. One buzzworthy breakthrough is progress toward error correction, which should let quantum computers perform sustained calculations instead of fleeting spurts of work. That improvement comes through overcoming a fundamental limit with qubits, the basic elements for storing and processing data in a quantum computer. Qubits are easily perturbed by outside forces, but error correction is designed to overcome the finickiness of individual qubits. It'll require bigger machines with many more qubits, but quantum computer makers see progress there, too.
"We're in the early industrial era of quantum computing," said Seth Lloyd, an MIT professor who helped found the field in the 1990s. He says the "huge advances" are comparable to the early use of steam engines to power factories, ships and trains. One buzzworthy breakthrough is progress toward error correction, which should let quantum computers perform sustained calculations instead of fleeting spurts of work. That improvement comes through overcoming a fundamental limit with qubits, the basic elements for storing and processing data in a quantum computer. Qubits are easily perturbed by outside forces, but error correction is designed to overcome the finickiness of individual qubits. It'll require bigger machines with many more qubits, but quantum computer makers see progress there, too.
As opposed to not liking the odds? (Score:3, Insightful)
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QCs may still turn out to be snake-oil. There are no experiments that actually prove scalability. These things may either not be possible in useful sizes (due to yet undiscovered effects sabotaging that) or the effort may increase so dramatically with size that sizes where they would be real-world useful will never be reached.
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The 'great progress' we keep hearing about seems to be for things that don't matter.
The thing that matters is being able to perform logic over error corrected qbits such that the number of cohered qbits can scale to a useful number. It has been that way for something like 15 years and none of the progress has actually made that important step and I don't see anything that suggests we will be able to do that.
It is possible that there are fundamental reasons why we cannot do that. The recent 'quantum supremac
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Yeah, that pretty much sums it up. I have been following this for about 30 years now and there still is nothing that would perform error correction better than these things pick up errors. For useful computations you need that, because you are going to perform a lot of steps before you have an useful result. That also means you just cannot run it a lot of times and hope one computation will get through, as that is far too unlikely to happen.
As to QC resistant crypto, I do not think there is a use-case for i
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One big problem (Score:3)
Re:One big problem (Score:5, Funny)
I mean, you haven't discovered paragraphs yet. So it makes sense that you can't grasp that QC's won't be utilized in consumer products.
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Re:One big problem (Score:4, Funny)
Nor logic, either...
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Eh, that's neat but it's probably only ever going to apply to a limited amount of hardware. Chances are the need for quantum computing in computers and smartphones will be minimal because non-quantum computing is has already outpaced most of our uses for high end processing. ... Quantum computing may very well always be a niche thing or a co-processor kind of thing.
Quantum computing has never been targeted at tasks that can be handled by classical computing. It's specifically the tasks that are not practical today, such as finding the prime factors of very large numbers that quantum computers potentially hold promise for. Yes, that's a very limited set of tasks, but the ability to perform those tasks would justify the required power and other costs and would be revolutionary. The problem is not power and cost; rather it's that the required size of quantum systems
Say we had one today (Score:4)
I'm wondering what the effects of having a quantum computer in our homes (or cellphones) would be. I know it can be used from cryptography or heavy scientific purposes.
But, say we all had a super capable quantum computer today:
How would our computing experience be better? Better video games? More sophisticated scheduling?
How would we use this breakthrough?
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Well, if nothing else it would mean you had a source of liquid helium and a cryocooler in your cell phone. Might be a bit awkward to get in your pocket though, and rough on the battery life.
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I think you missed the point of the question.
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I think you missed the point of the reply. Quantum computers require liquid helium temperatures. You're not going to have a quantum computer in your home, and certainly not your cellphone, ever, unless we discover some magic beyond known physics.
To answer the related question, what would *access* to a quantum computer do for you, the answer is probably nothing. Theoretically quantum computers might help with logistics problems and designing new wonder materials and stuff like that. I can't think of a single
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QCs require cryogenic temps. They aren't going in cellphones or homes.
If you have an app that can benefit from quantum calculations, you will access them as a service in the cloud.
Re: Say we had one today (Score:2)
That is false.
They are 1. assumed to 2. right now ... require cryogenic temperatures.
The whole point is that that could be either solvable or even just not necessary, as some research shows. (With stated being stable far longer than expected.)
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As an aside I think they managed to do a 20 mile teleportation of a particle recently (the particle doesn't really teleport. they manage to get one 20 miles away to have the same state as the original one- the original one loses its state)
Which is as much like teleportation as a television or telephone.
Buy our products! They will be great! (Score:2)
In other news, people pushing their own products like to lie about how great they are. Especially when their jobs are on the line if anybody finds out how bad their stuff really is. The "Big Lie" technique in its marketing variant.
Fact is, these things are still completely useless for any real-world computing and that will remain so for a long, long time. "Never" is a definitive possibility, and "in a few hundred years" is too.
So, no, they are in no "industrial era" at all. In fact,they are still lacking a
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Harumph, I say! Why already quantum computers have factored numbers as large as 15, in hardly more time than a second grader could. Clearly, you're behind the bleeding edge there, Gramps.
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Harumph, I say! Why already quantum computers have factored numbers as large as 15, in hardly more time than a second grader could. Clearly, you're behind the bleeding edge there, Gramps.
They actually made it to a non-faked factorization of 15? I mean, all the steps in sequence in a real long QC computation? I must have missed that. It seems I am indeed sorely behind!
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Every time I read of a new calculation, it's always qualified with "Well, we think it worked but was not faster than the classical way", which apparently the chip is still doing.
No risk. (Score:2)
The fact that it could pay off for them is just icing on the cake. What they are really doing is promoting themselves to the public as being "cutting edge" which can and will attract talent. It doesn't matter if it pans out as a technology or not because all the while they are funding research they wont stop blabbing about it. I'm betting they would invest more money in advertising that they researching than the actual research itself.
sounds like: (Score:2)
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If early steam engines were also required two horses to turn a crank, and output one horsepower, then it would be more like it.
284,374 years ago:
"It works! I invented flight!" shouted Grog, while laying on top of a log and inching it down the hill with his hands.
Wake me when they break RSA-1024 (Score:1)
Quantum computing will remain a curiosity until they demonstrate actual better performance. Factoring a 1024-bit RSA key for $10,000,000 would probably be where to call quantum computing real.
I have a feeling that the physicists will find out that keeping X qubits coherent requires energy exponential in X. This would make quantum computing pointless, and show that quantum mechanics isn't a way around the laws of physics.
What happens when the rich finance guys get these? (Score:2)
We read about cables that give traders sub millisecond advantages for high-frequency trading, it can make the difference between profits and losses. [slashdot.org]. That's not cheap.
Imagine what quantum computing will do for that industry? They've got the money, no pun intended, to invest in these kinds of technologies.
Buzzword bingo! (Score:1)
Somebod smell another Bitcoin-AI? (Score:2)
As in: Another market for the gamblers to blow up into a massive bubble way beyond the mundanity of what it actually is, to dump after that pump?
Stop crying wolf, QC people (Score:2)