Scott Aaronson on Google’s new quantum-computing paper | Hacker News Reader

Scott Aaronson on Google’s new quantum-computing paper

news.mit.edu

106 pointsmserdarsanli11 comments

If you came here like I did, thinking "HEY! That's old news!". You are correct. This added bonus is an interview of Aaronson for MIT News about his response to the google paper (which he previously blogged about). The original blog post has an update from Aaronson:

" MIT News now has a Q&A with me about the new Google paper. I’m really happy with how the Q&A turned out; people who had trouble understanding this blog post might find the Q&A easier. Thanks very much to Larry Hardesty for arranging it."

EDIT: It is definitely worth the read. A concise laymans summary of the original post and outline of the issues still to be overcome by D-Wave.

Yes, this is much easier to understand and to get the specific points of contention.

TL;DR version: If there's any quantum phenomena going on in that device, it is only happening within the 8-qubit domains and not between them.

Bonus food for thought: how much more of a speedup factor would an ASIC farm provide compared to a general purpose CPU for that particular use case if you threw $150M on it?

"There were $150 million dollars that went into designing this special-purpose hardware for this D-Wave machine and making it as fast possible. So in some sense, it’s no surprise that this special-purpose hardware could get a constant-factor speedup over a classical computer for the problem of simulating itself."

I kinda wonder how much money scott thinks goes into most chip hardware ;-)

(I think the special vs general purpose argument is certainly true, but citing the money numbers to bolster it seems ... silly)

I saw this headline and immediately thought "that's some pretty special paper."

It's been a long day.

> "A mainstream media article about quantum computer that starts with a reference to D-Wave can be safely ignored"

marcosdumay, HN, 1 hour ago

I think there's an obvious exception for MIT's news, especially when talking to Aaronson who has loudly been challenging D-Wave's quantum claims for years.

My general rule is to ignore anything that comes from MIT news as low quality anyway, so no conflict there.

Found the Caltech guy.

Now that someone has said this I realise I've been doing the same for quite some time. It looks like a PR department with a university attached. Edit: it's not so much that it's usually just low quality, it's the offputting way they always state "MIT researchers prove that...", and whenever I dig into the area it's clear there's an active research community with leading figures in less fashionable universities that get no mention from the MIT press corps. The other top US universities don't seem to do this, at least nowhere near as much as MIT. Then again, maybe it's the general press and public who have bought into MIT fetishism and they're the reason these stories get picked up so often. (Saying all that, Aaronson is pretty awesome though)

That quote is correct, but you need to understand the context: Scott Aaronson is pretty much the entire reason why you can safely ignore any article about D-Wave, because he's the one doing the legwork to debunk their BS. So articles from/about him are exempt.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com