Unpopular opinion I'm sure, but I very much quantum today as smoke and mirrors. I've tried to dive down that rabbit hole and I keep finding myself in a sea of theoretical mathematics that seems to fall into the "give me one miracle" category.
I expect this won't be the last time we hear about quantum research that has been foundational to a lot of work turns out to have been manipulated, or designed poorly and unverified by other research labs.
AndrewStephens · 3h ago
In 2001, a pure quantum computer using Shor's algorithm correctly gave the prime factors of 15. In 2012 they managed to find the prime factors of 21. Since then, everyone has given up on the purely quantum approach by using lots of traditional CPU-time to preprocess the input, somewhat defeating the purpose.
Its a shame. I was really looking forward to finding out what the prime factors of 34 are.
JohnKemeny · 2h ago
If I understand correctly, they didn't actually find the prime factors, they merely verified them, so it's unfortunately up to you to factor 34. Maybe some time in the future a quantum machine can verify whether you were right.
teekert · 2h ago
It's 2 and 17, I asked Claude.
AndrewStephens · 2h ago
AI can do that now? Looks like I have to upgrade all of my 5-bit SSL keys.
xxs · 1h ago
>5-bit SSL keys.
34 requires 6 bits, though
Bootvis · 1h ago
Hence the urgency.
Lionga · 2h ago
Not sure if it was more wasteful of energy asking Claude or trying to solve it with Quantum.
RHSeeger · 1h ago
We could ask Claude to generate the schematics for a quantum computer that can find the prime factors of 21. Then we get the best of both worlds.
solardev · 2h ago
A twelve year old could do it for 500 kcal of cookies.
tomashubelbauer · 1h ago
I volunteer as a tribute
pfdietz · 33m ago
Reminds me of the Groucho Marx line: "A child of five could understand this. Send someone to fetch a child of five."
rbanffy · 1h ago
At least quantum computers are cool.
xxs · 1h ago
The infamous 21 (which is half of 42) was my 1st thought when I heard 'unpopular' which is of course a very popular opinion.
bwfan123 · 2h ago
What amazes me is how big tech wants to be in on this bandwagon. There is fomo, and each company announces its own chip that does something - and nobody knows what. The risk of inaction is bigger than the risk of failure.
Meanwhile, a networking company wants to "network" these chips - what does that even mean ? And a gpu company produces a library for computing with quantum.
Smoke-and-mirrors can carry on for a long time, and fool the best of them. Isaac Newton was in on the alchemist bandwagon.
cjbgkagh · 2h ago
AFAIK, in the case of Microsoft, it's less FOMO and more about execs being able to impress their peers at other companies. So not really a fear of missing out but a desire to have an exclusive access to a technology that has already been socialized and widely understood to be impressive. It's a simple message, 'that impressive thing you've been reading about, we're the ones building that'.
jhallenworld · 42m ago
Also: the big company "thought leaders" need something new to talk about every year at conferences like "Microsoft Ignite" or whatever. These people will push funding into things like quantum research just for this. I'm sure they're getting lots of mileage out of LLMs these days...
I'm maybe a little jaded having worked on whole products that had no market success, but were in fact just so that the company had something new to talk about.
shalg · 1h ago
There are exactly 2 reasons we might want quantum networks.
1. 100% secure communication channels (even better we can detect any attempt at eavesdropping and whatever information is captured will be useless to the eavesdropper)
2. Building larger quantum computers. A high fidelity quantum network would allow you to compute simultaneously with multiple quantum chips by interfacing them.
The thing that makes quantum networking different from regular networking is that you have to be very careful to not disturb the state of the photons you are sending down the fiber optics.
Im currently doing my PhD building quantum networking devices so im a bit biased but I think it’s pretty cool :).
Now does it matter I’m not sure. Reason 1 isn’t really that useful because encryption is very secure. However if quantum computers start to scale up and some encryption methods get obsoleted this could be nice. Also having encryption that is provably secure would be nice regardless.
Reason 2 at the moment seems like the only path to building large scale quantum computing. Think a datacenter with many networked quantum chips.
nativeit · 44m ago
> 100% secure communication channels (even better we can detect any attempt at eavesdropping and whatever information is captured will be useless to the eavesdropper) chips.
A few follow up questions:
1. What is it about quantum computers that can guarantee 100% secure communication channels?
2. If the communications are 100% secure, why are we worried about eavesdropping?
3. If it can detect eavesdropping, why do we need to concern ourselves with the information they might see/hear? Just respond to the detection.
4. What is it about quantum computing that would make an eavesdroppers’ overheard information useless to them, without also obviating said information to the intended recipients?
This is where the language used to discuss this topic turns into word salad for me. None of the things you said necessarily follow from the things that were said before them, but rather just levied as accepted fact.
nativeit · 50m ago
I feel like most of your answer was just re-stating the question. I’m happy to admit that’s almost certainly a mix of my ignorance on the topic at hand, and I have been primed to view the discussions surrounding quantum computing with suspicion, but either way, that’s the way it reads to this layperson.
chatmasta · 49m ago
If studio execs have their way, Quantum DRM will be the killer use case…
sharpshadow · 21m ago
It’s not only big tech. Since months I’m reading about joint venture types between companies of European countries with state sponsoring in QC. When you follow the path there are a bundle of fresh created companies in every country each claiming a branch like quantum communication, quantum encryption, quantum this.. all working together and cooperating with the same companies in other EU countries.
Still trying to figure out what is going on. Are they preposition for the upcoming breakthroughs and until then it will be like the beginning in AI where many claimed to have it but actually just pretended.
Additionally they likely want to access the money flow.
mepian · 2h ago
It is really desperation, the low-hanging fruit of computing paradigm shifts to fuel the "tech" industry's growth was completely plucked more than a decade ago.
There are maybe other reasons to invest, but this caused me to sell my shares
gaze · 44m ago
Pessimistically I think it's most comparable to fusion. Theoretically possible but very difficult. I'm biased because I'm in the industry, but nothing has cropped up that I've seen that requires a miracle.
naasking · 39m ago
> I'm biased because I'm in the industry, but nothing has cropped up that I've seen that requires a miracle.
Scaling is itself the open question. Gravitational effects start creeping in when you scale up sensitive entangled systems and we don't have a good understanding of how gravity interacts with entanglement. Entangled systems above a certain size may just be impossible.
baxtr · 1h ago
I was also skeptical until Sabine recently changed her mind in one of her videos, citing the latest advancements in photonic quantum computing as the reason.
tjpnz · 25m ago
Quantum annealers have been working on real world problems for a while now - assuming they can be expressed as combinatorial optimization problems of course.
yesbut · 3h ago
It is all a scam. The research side is interesting for what it is, but the idea of having any type of useful "quantum computer" is sci-fi make believe. The grifters will keep stringing investors and these large corporations along for as long as possible. Total waste of resources.
cess11 · 3h ago
IBM has given the public access to qubits for close to a decade, including a free tier, and as far as I know it produced a stream of research articles that fizzled out several years ago and nothing generally useful.
Your words sounds like what people said in the 40s and 50s about computers.
os2warpman · 2h ago
In the 40s and 50s programmable general-purpose electronic computers were solving problems.
Ballistics tables, decryption of enemy messages, and more. Early programmable general-purpose electronic computers, from the moment they were turned on could solve problems in minutes that would take human computers months or years. In the 40s, ENIAC proved the feasibility of thermonuclear weaponry.
By 1957 the promise and peril of computing entered popular culture with the Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn film "Desk Set" where a computer is installed in a library and runs amok, firing everybody, all while romantic shenanigans occur. It was sponsored by IBM and is one of the first instances of product placement in films.
People knew "electronic brains" were the future the second they started spitting out printouts of practically unsolvable problems instantly-- they just didn't (during your timeframe) predict the invention and adoption of the transistor and its miniaturization, which made computers ubiquitous household objects.
Even the quote about the supposed limited market for computers trotted out from time-to-time to demonstrate the hesitance of industry and academia to adopt computers is wrong.
In 1953 when Thomas Watson said that "there's only a market for five computers" what he actually said was "When we developed the IBM 701 we created a customer list of 20 organizations who might want it and because it is so expensive we expected to only sign five deals, but we ended up signing 18" (paraphrased).
Militaries, universities, and industry all wanted all of the programmable general-purpose electronic computers they could afford the second it became available because they all knew that it could solve problems.
Included for comparison is a list of problems that quantum computing has solved:
RhysabOweyn · 2h ago
I don't think that you can really make that comparison. "Conventional" computers had more proven practical usage (especially by nation states) in the 40s/50s than quantum computing does today.
lucianbr · 2h ago
Survivor bias. Just because a certain thing seemed like a scam and turned out useful does not mean all things that seem like a scam will turn out useful.
monooso · 1h ago
GP's comment didn't suggest that every supposed scam will turn out to be useful.
Quite the opposite, in fact. It was pointing out that some supposed scams do turn out to be useful.
mrguyorama · 57s ago
GP is just blatantly wrong. Electronic computation was NEVER considered a "scam".
The Navy, Air Force, government, private institutions, etc didn't dump billions of funding into computers because they thought they were overrated.
empath75 · 2h ago
By the 1940s and 50s, computers were already being used for practical and useful work, and calculating machines had a _long_ history of being useful, and it didn't take that long between the _idea_ of a calculating machine and having something that people paid for and used because it had practical value.
They've been plugging along at quantum computers for decades now and have not produced a single useful machine (although a lot of the math and science behind it has been useful for theoretical physics).
I'm not the OP, but when you're of a certain age, you don't need citations for that. Memory serves. And my family was saying those sorts of things and teasing me about being into computers as late as the 1970's.
Henchman21 · 1h ago
When you’re of a certain age, time has likely blurred your memories. Citation becomes more important then. Source: me I’m an old SOB.
reaperducer · 1h ago
Source: me I’m an old SOB.
By your own criteria, a citation better than "me" is needed.
pessimizer · 51m ago
Looks like you've got it.
DangitBobby · 2h ago
I would actually like to read about that, though.
Mistletoe · 3h ago
I became disillusioned when I learned that 5x3=15 was the largest number that has been factored by a quantum computer without tricks or scams. Then I became even more disillusioned when I learned the 15 may not be legit…
The most accurate and expirimentaly tested theory of reality is "smoke and mirrors".
There are so many other areas to say that about, even in physics. But this?...
tokai · 1h ago
With the context of the article its clear that GP means quantum computing.
krastanov · 4h ago
This is such a beautiful theoretical idea (a type of "natural" error correction which protects the qubits without having to deal with the exorbitant overhead of error correcting codes). It is very disheartening and discouraging and just plain exhausting that there has been so much "data manipulation" in this subfield (see all the other retracted papers from the last 5 years mentioned in the article). I can only imagine how hard this must be on the junior scientists on the team who have been swept into it without much control.
pc86 · 3h ago
Hopefully people are keeping lists of the PIs on these redacted papers and keeping that in mind for future grants, hiring, etc. I know almost nobody is, but one can hope.
Academic fraud ranging from plagiarism to outright faking data should, more often than not, make it basically impossible for you to get any academic job whatsoever, in your field or others.
This chip is an extreme example, but potentially millions of dollars of productivity, hundreds or even thousands of people spending months or years on something based in a fabrication.
The person or people directly responsible for this should never work again.
jakobgm · 3h ago
Totally agree! As with any behavior which is difficult to detect and often goes by unnoticed; the punishment should be large enough for the expected value of fraud being clearly net negative for those that might feel tempted at "tweaking some numbers".
In case anybody else also isn't familiar with "PI" as an abbreviation in this context:
> In many countries, the term principal investigator (PI) refers to the holder of an independent grant and the lead researcher for the grant project, usually in the sciences, such as a laboratory study or a clinical trial.
> Academic fraud ranging from plagiarism to outright faking data should, more often than not, make it basically impossible for you to get any academic job whatsoever, in your field or others.
Sadly, the system is often rewarding fake or, especially, exaggerated/misrepresented data and conclusions. I think that a significant proportion of articles exaggerate findings and deliberately cherry-pick data.
It's a market of lemons. Proving misrepresentation is really hard, and the rewards for doing so are immense. Publishing an article in Nature, Science, or Cell is a career-defining moment.
pc86 · 2h ago
Yeah I agree it's not an easy problem to solve by any stretch. I'm not a professor or scientist so I won't pretend to understand the intricacies of journal publication and that sort of thing.
But I do wonder when someone's PhD thesis gets published and it turns out they plagiarized large parts of it, why isn't their degree revoked? When someone is a professor at a prestigious institution and they fabricate data, why are they still teaching the following year?
nextos · 1h ago
Serious universities do often revoke doctoral degrees if plagiarism is proven. I've seen Oxford University going as far as demanding someone to issue a correction of a journal article to cite prior work because they were making some claims of novelty that were not true.
> When someone is a professor at a prestigious institution and they fabricate data, why are they still teaching the following year?
Internal politics. Committees judging potential misconduct are not independent. If you are sufficiently high up in the ladder, you can get away with many things. Sweden recently created a Swedish National Board for Assessment of Research Misconduct (Npof) to address this problem. I think this is a step in the right direction.
But, ultimately, I think academic fraud should be judged in court. However, e.g. Leonid Schneider (forbetterscience.com) has been taken to court several times for reporting fraud, including fraud that led to patient death, and some judges didn't seem to care much about data fabrication / misrepresentation.
NoMoreNicksLeft · 3h ago
>Academic fraud ranging from plagiarism to outright faking data should, more often than not, make it basically impossible for you to get any academic job whatsoever, in your field or others.
That might actually be a perverse incentive. If you've already nuked your career with some fraud, you can't make it worse by extra fraud... why ever stop? People inclined to do this sort of thing, when faced with that deterrent just double down and commit even more fraud, they figure the best that can be hoped for is to do it so much and so perfectly that they're never discovered.
The trouble is that the system for science worked well when there exists only some tiny number of scientists, but now we're a planet of 8 billion and where people tell their children they have to go to college and get a STEM degree. Hell, you can only become a scientist by producing new research, even if there's not much left to research in your field. And the only way to maintain that position as a scientist is "to publish or perish". We have finite avenues of research with an ever-growing population of scientists, bullshit is inevitable.
dullcrisp · 2h ago
You stop because you can’t get a job?
pc86 · 2h ago
Even if "bullshit is inevitable" is true -- I don't think it is -- that doesn't mean we shouldn't punish people who make up data, who steal others' work, who steal grant money by using their fake data to justify future grants.
"Well there's lots of people now" is not really a great justification. You become a low trust society by allowing trust to deteriorate. That happens in part because you choose not to punish people who violate that trust in the first place.
NoMoreNicksLeft · 2h ago
>that doesn't mean we shouldn't punish people who make up data,
I am not wishy-washy on punishment. A part of me that I do not deny nor suppress wants punishment for those who do wrong.
But sometimes punishments are counter-productive. The easiest example is the death penalty for heinous, non-murder crimes. This incentivizes the rapist or child molester (or whatever) to kill the victim. You can't execute them twice, after all, so if they're already on the hook for a death penalty crime, murdering their victim also gets rid of a prime witness who could get them the death penalty by testifying, but without increasing the odds of the death penalty.
"Career death penalty" here is like that.
>"Well there's lots of people now" is not really a great justification.
It wasn't meant to be a justification. It was an explanation of the problem, and (in part, at least) and attempt to show that things need to change if we want the fraud to go away.
>You become a low trust society by allowing trust to deteriorate
We've been a low trust society for a long time now. People need to start thinking about how to accomplish the long, slow process of changing a low trust society to a high trust one.
kevinventullo · 44m ago
In the case of academia, I’m fine with harsh punishment for people who fabricate data, even if it does incentivize them to be more brazen with their fabrications in the short term. Makes it easier to catch them!
The fact is, we don’t want these people in academia at all. You want researchers who are naturally inclined not to fabricate data, not people who only play by the rules because they think they’re otherwise going to get caught.
hollerith · 2h ago
>We've been a low trust society for a long time now.
Although trust has been decreasing, the US remains a high-trust society compared to the global average.
mschuster91 · 1h ago
> We've been a low trust society for a long time now. People need to start thinking about how to accomplish the long, slow process of changing a low trust society to a high trust one.
The core problem is that most people define their self-worth by their employment, and no matter what, this is all going to crash hard due to automation. The generation currently in power is doing everything they can to deny and downplay what is about to happen, instead of helping our societies prepare.
We're all being thrown into the rat race, it is being told to us verbally and in personal experience that there is no alternative than to become the top dog at all costs because that will be the only chance to survive once automation truly hits home. The result is that those who have the feeling they have failed the rat race and have no hope of catching up withdraw from the "societal contract" and just do whatever they want, at the expense of others if need be.
teekert · 2h ago
Sabine was already skeptical in February [0]. Although to be fair, she usually is :) But in this field, I think it is warranted.
Is there something she is not skeptical of or controversial about?
nlitened · 1h ago
Einstein equations
chermi · 1h ago
A broken clock....
eqvinox · 2h ago
Sabine Hossenfelder has grown a little… controversial… lately. You should probably do some googling (or YouTube searching, in this case.) It's not entirely clear to me what's going on but some of her videos do raise serious question marks.
matkoniecz · 2h ago
can you be more specific what you are alleging?
and little controversy is not automatically a problem or reason to discount/ignore someone anyway
HideousKojima · 56m ago
There was an email she claimed to have received many years ago from another academic essentially saying "you're right that a lot of academic research is BS and just a jobs program for academics, but you shouldn't point that out because it's threatening a lot of people's livelihood." Some people are claiming she fabricated this alleged email etc., I haven't looked too much into it myself.
sschueller · 3h ago
Sadly I have the feeling some people are starting to just "play" being scientists/engineers and not actually doing the real work anymore.
77pt77 · 1h ago
MBA science.
Only perception matters?
Panoramix · 3h ago
Looking at the paper, cherry picking 5 out of 21 devices is in itself not a deal breaker IMO, but it's certainly something they should have disclosed. I bet this happens all the time with these kinds of exotic devices that take almost a year to manufacture only for a single misplaced atom to ruin the whole measurement.
Average of positive and negative Vbias data and many other manipulations are hard to justify, this reeks of "desperate PhD needed to publish at all costs". Yet at the same time I wouldn't fully disqualify the findings, but make the conclusion a lot weaker "there might be something here".
All in all, it's in Microsoft's interests that the data is not cooked. They can only ride on vaporware for so long. Sooner or later the truth will come out; and if Microsoft is burning a lot of cash to lie to everyone, the only loser will be Microsoft.
darth_avocado · 1h ago
> cherry picking 5 out of 21 devices is in itself not a deal breaker IMO
Might as well draw a straight line through a cloud of data points that look like a dog
crote · 44m ago
It's a physical device at the bleeding edge of capabilities. Defects are pretty much a guarantee, and getting a working sample is a numbers game. Is it really that strange to not get a 100% yield?
Having 5 working devices out of 21 is normal. The problem is that the other 16 weren't mentioned.
darth_avocado · 30m ago
Well you also need to account for what kind of deviation are we talking about between the 21. If they selected the 5 because they were the best, but the others showed results that were within say 0-5% of the 5, then sure that is acceptable. But if we’re talking about flipping a coin 21 times, seeing heads 16 times and then choosing the 5 tails outcomes as the results, then I would say that’s pretty unacceptable.
Panoramix · 16m ago
Like I said, a single misplaced atom is enough to wreak havoc in the behaviour of these things. That's not the problem, everyone knows there's a large gap between phenomena observed, and making it consistently manufacturable with high yield.
nathan_compton · 57m ago
> the only loser will be Microsoft.
Not really - that cash could have been allocated to more productive work and more honest people.
os2warpman · 2h ago
As far as I can tell the only thing >25 years of development into quantum computing implementations has resulted in is the prodigious consumption of helium-3.
At least with fusion we've gotten some cool lasers, magnets, and test and measurement gear.
russianGuy83829 · 3h ago
that's going to be a banger bobbybroccoli video
chermi · 51m ago
Based on the comments in this thread... Guys, Microsoft fuckery doesn't invalidate an entire field.
I think certain VCs are a little too optimistic about quantum computing timelines, but that doesn't mean it's not steadily progressing. I saw a comment talking about prime factorization from 2001 with some claim that people haven't been working on pure quantum computing since then?
It's really hard. It's still firmly academic, with the peculiar factor that much of it is industry backed. Google quantum was a UCSB research lab turned into a Google branch, while still being powered by grad students. You can begin to see how there's going to be some culture clash and unfortunate pressure to make claims and take research paths atypical of academia (not excusing any fraud). It's a hard problem in a funky environment.
1) it's a really hard problem. Anything truly quantum is hard to deal with, especially if you require long coherence times. Consider the entire field of condensed matter (+ some amo). Many of the experiments to measure special quantum properties/confirm theories do so in a destructive manner - I'm not talking only about the quantum measurement problem, I'm talking about the probes themselves physically altering the system such that you can only get one or maybe a few good measurements before the sample is useless. In quantum computing, things need to be cold, isolated, yet still read/write accessible over many many cycles in order to be useful.
2) given the difficulty, there's been many proposals for how to meet the "practical quantum computer" requirement. This ranges from giving up on a true general purpose quantum computer (quantum annealers) to NV vacancies, neutral/ionic lattices, squid/Josephson based,photonic, hybrid system with mechanical resonators, and yeah, topological/anyon shit.
3) It's hard to predict what will actually work, so every approach is a gamble and different groups take different gambles. Some take bigger gambles than the others. Id say topological quantum was a pretty damn big gamble given how new the theory was.
4) Then you need to gradually build up the actually system + infrastructure, validating each subsystem then subsystem interactions and finally full systems. Think system preparation, system readout, system manipulation, isolation, gate design... Each piece of this could be multiple +/- physicist, ece/cse, me, CS PhDs + postdocs amount of work. This is deep expertise and specialization.
4) Then if one approach seems to work, however poorly*, you need to improve it, scale it. Scaling is not guaranteed. This will mean many more PhDs worth trying to improve subsystems.
5) again, this is really hard. Truly, purely quantum systems are very difficult to work with. Classical computing is built on transistors, which operate just fine at room temperature*(plenty of noise, no need for cold isolation) with macroscopic classical observables/manipulations like current, voltage. Yes, transistors work because of quantum effects, and with more recent transistors more directly use quantum effects (tunneling). For example, the "atomic" units of memory are still effectively macroscopic. The systems as a whole are very well described classically, with only practical engineering concerns related to putting things too close together, impurities, heat dissipation. Not to say that any of that is easy at all, but there's no question of principle like "will this even work?"
* With a bunch of people on HN shitting on how poorly + a bunch of other people saying its a full blown quantum computer + probably higher ups trying to make you say it is a real quantum computer or something about quantum supremacy.
*Even in this classical regime think how much effort went into redundancy and encoding/decoding schemes to deal with the very rare bit flips. Now think of what's needed to build a functioning quantum computer at similar scale
No, I don't work in quantum computing, don't invest in it, have no stake in it.
wordpad · 11m ago
Why couldn't single-user quantum computers be a viable path?
General computing is great, but we built large hadron collider to validate a few specific physics theories, couldn't we we make do with single-use quantum computer for important problems? Prove out some physics simulation, or to break some military encryption or something?
I expect this won't be the last time we hear about quantum research that has been foundational to a lot of work turns out to have been manipulated, or designed poorly and unverified by other research labs.
Its a shame. I was really looking forward to finding out what the prime factors of 34 are.
34 requires 6 bits, though
Meanwhile, a networking company wants to "network" these chips - what does that even mean ? And a gpu company produces a library for computing with quantum.
Smoke-and-mirrors can carry on for a long time, and fool the best of them. Isaac Newton was in on the alchemist bandwagon.
I'm maybe a little jaded having worked on whole products that had no market success, but were in fact just so that the company had something new to talk about.
1. 100% secure communication channels (even better we can detect any attempt at eavesdropping and whatever information is captured will be useless to the eavesdropper)
2. Building larger quantum computers. A high fidelity quantum network would allow you to compute simultaneously with multiple quantum chips by interfacing them.
The thing that makes quantum networking different from regular networking is that you have to be very careful to not disturb the state of the photons you are sending down the fiber optics.
Im currently doing my PhD building quantum networking devices so im a bit biased but I think it’s pretty cool :).
Now does it matter I’m not sure. Reason 1 isn’t really that useful because encryption is very secure. However if quantum computers start to scale up and some encryption methods get obsoleted this could be nice. Also having encryption that is provably secure would be nice regardless.
Reason 2 at the moment seems like the only path to building large scale quantum computing. Think a datacenter with many networked quantum chips.
1. What is it about quantum computers that can guarantee 100% secure communication channels?
2. If the communications are 100% secure, why are we worried about eavesdropping?
3. If it can detect eavesdropping, why do we need to concern ourselves with the information they might see/hear? Just respond to the detection.
4. What is it about quantum computing that would make an eavesdroppers’ overheard information useless to them, without also obviating said information to the intended recipients?
This is where the language used to discuss this topic turns into word salad for me. None of the things you said necessarily follow from the things that were said before them, but rather just levied as accepted fact.
Still trying to figure out what is going on. Are they preposition for the upcoming breakthroughs and until then it will be like the beginning in AI where many claimed to have it but actually just pretended. Additionally they likely want to access the money flow.
There are maybe other reasons to invest, but this caused me to sell my shares
Scaling is itself the open question. Gravitational effects start creeping in when you scale up sensitive entangled systems and we don't have a good understanding of how gravity interacts with entanglement. Entangled systems above a certain size may just be impossible.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Quantum_Platform
Your words sounds like what people said in the 40s and 50s about computers.
Ballistics tables, decryption of enemy messages, and more. Early programmable general-purpose electronic computers, from the moment they were turned on could solve problems in minutes that would take human computers months or years. In the 40s, ENIAC proved the feasibility of thermonuclear weaponry.
By 1957 the promise and peril of computing entered popular culture with the Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn film "Desk Set" where a computer is installed in a library and runs amok, firing everybody, all while romantic shenanigans occur. It was sponsored by IBM and is one of the first instances of product placement in films.
People knew "electronic brains" were the future the second they started spitting out printouts of practically unsolvable problems instantly-- they just didn't (during your timeframe) predict the invention and adoption of the transistor and its miniaturization, which made computers ubiquitous household objects.
Even the quote about the supposed limited market for computers trotted out from time-to-time to demonstrate the hesitance of industry and academia to adopt computers is wrong.
In 1953 when Thomas Watson said that "there's only a market for five computers" what he actually said was "When we developed the IBM 701 we created a customer list of 20 organizations who might want it and because it is so expensive we expected to only sign five deals, but we ended up signing 18" (paraphrased).
Militaries, universities, and industry all wanted all of the programmable general-purpose electronic computers they could afford the second it became available because they all knew that it could solve problems.
Included for comparison is a list of problems that quantum computing has solved:
Quite the opposite, in fact. It was pointing out that some supposed scams do turn out to be useful.
The Navy, Air Force, government, private institutions, etc didn't dump billions of funding into computers because they thought they were overrated.
They've been plugging along at quantum computers for decades now and have not produced a single useful machine (although a lot of the math and science behind it has been useful for theoretical physics).
I'm not the OP, but when you're of a certain age, you don't need citations for that. Memory serves. And my family was saying those sorts of things and teasing me about being into computers as late as the 1970's.
By your own criteria, a citation better than "me" is needed.
https://www.reddit.com/r/QuantumComputing/comments/1535lii/w...
The most accurate and expirimentaly tested theory of reality is "smoke and mirrors".
There are so many other areas to say that about, even in physics. But this?...
Academic fraud ranging from plagiarism to outright faking data should, more often than not, make it basically impossible for you to get any academic job whatsoever, in your field or others.
This chip is an extreme example, but potentially millions of dollars of productivity, hundreds or even thousands of people spending months or years on something based in a fabrication.
The person or people directly responsible for this should never work again.
In case anybody else also isn't familiar with "PI" as an abbreviation in this context:
> In many countries, the term principal investigator (PI) refers to the holder of an independent grant and the lead researcher for the grant project, usually in the sciences, such as a laboratory study or a clinical trial.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal_investigator
Sadly, the system is often rewarding fake or, especially, exaggerated/misrepresented data and conclusions. I think that a significant proportion of articles exaggerate findings and deliberately cherry-pick data.
It's a market of lemons. Proving misrepresentation is really hard, and the rewards for doing so are immense. Publishing an article in Nature, Science, or Cell is a career-defining moment.
But I do wonder when someone's PhD thesis gets published and it turns out they plagiarized large parts of it, why isn't their degree revoked? When someone is a professor at a prestigious institution and they fabricate data, why are they still teaching the following year?
> When someone is a professor at a prestigious institution and they fabricate data, why are they still teaching the following year?
Internal politics. Committees judging potential misconduct are not independent. If you are sufficiently high up in the ladder, you can get away with many things. Sweden recently created a Swedish National Board for Assessment of Research Misconduct (Npof) to address this problem. I think this is a step in the right direction.
But, ultimately, I think academic fraud should be judged in court. However, e.g. Leonid Schneider (forbetterscience.com) has been taken to court several times for reporting fraud, including fraud that led to patient death, and some judges didn't seem to care much about data fabrication / misrepresentation.
That might actually be a perverse incentive. If you've already nuked your career with some fraud, you can't make it worse by extra fraud... why ever stop? People inclined to do this sort of thing, when faced with that deterrent just double down and commit even more fraud, they figure the best that can be hoped for is to do it so much and so perfectly that they're never discovered.
The trouble is that the system for science worked well when there exists only some tiny number of scientists, but now we're a planet of 8 billion and where people tell their children they have to go to college and get a STEM degree. Hell, you can only become a scientist by producing new research, even if there's not much left to research in your field. And the only way to maintain that position as a scientist is "to publish or perish". We have finite avenues of research with an ever-growing population of scientists, bullshit is inevitable.
"Well there's lots of people now" is not really a great justification. You become a low trust society by allowing trust to deteriorate. That happens in part because you choose not to punish people who violate that trust in the first place.
I am not wishy-washy on punishment. A part of me that I do not deny nor suppress wants punishment for those who do wrong.
But sometimes punishments are counter-productive. The easiest example is the death penalty for heinous, non-murder crimes. This incentivizes the rapist or child molester (or whatever) to kill the victim. You can't execute them twice, after all, so if they're already on the hook for a death penalty crime, murdering their victim also gets rid of a prime witness who could get them the death penalty by testifying, but without increasing the odds of the death penalty.
"Career death penalty" here is like that.
>"Well there's lots of people now" is not really a great justification.
It wasn't meant to be a justification. It was an explanation of the problem, and (in part, at least) and attempt to show that things need to change if we want the fraud to go away.
>You become a low trust society by allowing trust to deteriorate
We've been a low trust society for a long time now. People need to start thinking about how to accomplish the long, slow process of changing a low trust society to a high trust one.
The fact is, we don’t want these people in academia at all. You want researchers who are naturally inclined not to fabricate data, not people who only play by the rules because they think they’re otherwise going to get caught.
Although trust has been decreasing, the US remains a high-trust society compared to the global average.
The core problem is that most people define their self-worth by their employment, and no matter what, this is all going to crash hard due to automation. The generation currently in power is doing everything they can to deny and downplay what is about to happen, instead of helping our societies prepare.
We're all being thrown into the rat race, it is being told to us verbally and in personal experience that there is no alternative than to become the top dog at all costs because that will be the only chance to survive once automation truly hits home. The result is that those who have the feeling they have failed the rat race and have no hope of catching up withdraw from the "societal contract" and just do whatever they want, at the expense of others if need be.
[0]: https://backreaction.blogspot.com/2025/02/microsoft-exaggera...
and little controversy is not automatically a problem or reason to discount/ignore someone anyway
Only perception matters?
Average of positive and negative Vbias data and many other manipulations are hard to justify, this reeks of "desperate PhD needed to publish at all costs". Yet at the same time I wouldn't fully disqualify the findings, but make the conclusion a lot weaker "there might be something here".
All in all, it's in Microsoft's interests that the data is not cooked. They can only ride on vaporware for so long. Sooner or later the truth will come out; and if Microsoft is burning a lot of cash to lie to everyone, the only loser will be Microsoft.
Might as well draw a straight line through a cloud of data points that look like a dog
Having 5 working devices out of 21 is normal. The problem is that the other 16 weren't mentioned.
Not really - that cash could have been allocated to more productive work and more honest people.
At least with fusion we've gotten some cool lasers, magnets, and test and measurement gear.
I think certain VCs are a little too optimistic about quantum computing timelines, but that doesn't mean it's not steadily progressing. I saw a comment talking about prime factorization from 2001 with some claim that people haven't been working on pure quantum computing since then?
It's really hard. It's still firmly academic, with the peculiar factor that much of it is industry backed. Google quantum was a UCSB research lab turned into a Google branch, while still being powered by grad students. You can begin to see how there's going to be some culture clash and unfortunate pressure to make claims and take research paths atypical of academia (not excusing any fraud). It's a hard problem in a funky environment.
1) it's a really hard problem. Anything truly quantum is hard to deal with, especially if you require long coherence times. Consider the entire field of condensed matter (+ some amo). Many of the experiments to measure special quantum properties/confirm theories do so in a destructive manner - I'm not talking only about the quantum measurement problem, I'm talking about the probes themselves physically altering the system such that you can only get one or maybe a few good measurements before the sample is useless. In quantum computing, things need to be cold, isolated, yet still read/write accessible over many many cycles in order to be useful.
2) given the difficulty, there's been many proposals for how to meet the "practical quantum computer" requirement. This ranges from giving up on a true general purpose quantum computer (quantum annealers) to NV vacancies, neutral/ionic lattices, squid/Josephson based,photonic, hybrid system with mechanical resonators, and yeah, topological/anyon shit.
3) It's hard to predict what will actually work, so every approach is a gamble and different groups take different gambles. Some take bigger gambles than the others. Id say topological quantum was a pretty damn big gamble given how new the theory was.
4) Then you need to gradually build up the actually system + infrastructure, validating each subsystem then subsystem interactions and finally full systems. Think system preparation, system readout, system manipulation, isolation, gate design... Each piece of this could be multiple +/- physicist, ece/cse, me, CS PhDs + postdocs amount of work. This is deep expertise and specialization.
4) Then if one approach seems to work, however poorly*, you need to improve it, scale it. Scaling is not guaranteed. This will mean many more PhDs worth trying to improve subsystems.
5) again, this is really hard. Truly, purely quantum systems are very difficult to work with. Classical computing is built on transistors, which operate just fine at room temperature*(plenty of noise, no need for cold isolation) with macroscopic classical observables/manipulations like current, voltage. Yes, transistors work because of quantum effects, and with more recent transistors more directly use quantum effects (tunneling). For example, the "atomic" units of memory are still effectively macroscopic. The systems as a whole are very well described classically, with only practical engineering concerns related to putting things too close together, impurities, heat dissipation. Not to say that any of that is easy at all, but there's no question of principle like "will this even work?"
* With a bunch of people on HN shitting on how poorly + a bunch of other people saying its a full blown quantum computer + probably higher ups trying to make you say it is a real quantum computer or something about quantum supremacy.
*Even in this classical regime think how much effort went into redundancy and encoding/decoding schemes to deal with the very rare bit flips. Now think of what's needed to build a functioning quantum computer at similar scale
No, I don't work in quantum computing, don't invest in it, have no stake in it.
General computing is great, but we built large hadron collider to validate a few specific physics theories, couldn't we we make do with single-use quantum computer for important problems? Prove out some physics simulation, or to break some military encryption or something?
And while searching for this silly joke, I'm now baffled by the fact that it's still alive !