Quantum computing is almost ready for business, startup says | Hacker News Reader

Quantum computing is almost ready for business, startup says

fastcompany.com

101 pointsseancaptain40 comments

Quantum computers are fine. What we also need to focus on are different kinds/models of computing on a traditional computer. The industry is very very young and there are so many untested, postponed or unfinished ideas that were left in limbo (pun kinda intended) because of the market.

What I would really love to see are some of these computing models brought back to life. Alan Kay's idea of computing looks very interesting albeit very scattered; Exokernels is another interesting thought, which could lead up to very interesting distributed computing model (like an irc, but c stands for computing); Transactional Memory is another. There are a lot of them, and I think they are best served by an organisation in lieu with Bell Labs or Xerox Research..

On a related note, modern GPUs are basically Connection Machines on a chip without the interconnection network.

Missing just a lisp* system on GPU, which is a very interesting project for thesis

Have a look at https://clojurecuda.uncomplicate.org/

A lot of the Rigetti system is written in Lisp, though not *Lisp of course! [1]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15880172

Is there an overview of "Alan Kay's idea of computing"?

I've had a period where I was deeply interested in reading and listening to any of his ideas and talks, but I've never spent any time with the information, other than just consuming some of his ideas.

I have some vague ideas about what his ideas are, and where he thinks we're still lagging behind, but I have no idea what "Alan Kay's idea of computing" is supposed to be.

Unless, are you talking about his idea of objects as the smallest abstraction of computers, giving each object something akin to an ip-address; where programming happens by wiring together these objects?

They're creating a cloud SaaS platform, yet haven't actually solved the quantum issue, which will be solved in: "My guess is this could happen anytime from six to 36 months".

This company has built the easy part first (the web app and database), and now just needs to do the the insanely hard problem at the core of their business which nobody knows is possible to solve.

I would probably not invest, is what I'm saying.

This is inaccurate. The first thing this company built was a programmable quantum computer. The second thing they did was build a quantum integrated circuit fabrication facility. 4 or 5 years in they started doing access models with software (“web app”, a term that’s also inaccurate, and DB).

Having a quantum integrated circuit without a way to access it (a cloud platform, in Rigetti’s case), is like having a CPU without a motherboard. How might you expect to program the integrated circuit if it has no infrastructure to allow it to be programmed? This is a key ingredient to quantum advantage, not just the hard science of manufacturing scalable and fault-tolerant integrated circuits, especially since the notion of programming such a circuit is already a woefully nascent field.

So, what's the "6 - 36 months" piece then, if they already have a workable quantum computer? Answer: they don't, and they don't know if they ever will, otherwise the time to completion would not have a totally arbitrary made up timeline. No?

Quantum computers are analog devices that operate at varying levels of fidelity. Timelines usually refer to how long it takes to get to the next performance node, not how long it takes for a quantum computer to exist at all. They exist, are programmable, and are often accessible to third-parties. Plenty of sources conclude that independently. Many institutions, Rigetti Computing included, have built functional quantum computers.

The title is helluva misleading. AWS cloud became "The AWS" because there was already a huge tried and tested market of traditional computers (literally 99.9999% of modern computing is 2 bit computing). They sure can become the pioneers of offering large scale subscription based quantum computing. It is annoying how marketers will go above and beyond to generalize terms just to convey their point. I wish them best of luck and hopefully they will introduce quantum computing to an average joe programmer.

Like Kickstarter almost ready or Python 3 almost ready?

Anyone have tips for getting up on the waitlist? I wonder if they are prioritizing researchers.

You can sign up now and be able to use a form of cloud quantum computing. I think to get actual access to the quantum computer, though, you have to explain what you want to use it for. So i'd imagine they are focusing on research projects or other interesting uses.

I went to a presentation by Gwen at SciPy2018 and got to talk to her a little later. They're doing some really cool things with this stuff. I think they're also trying to just get people more used to quantum programming in general. If you haven't looked up their PyQuil language yet, it's definitely worth checking out. https://pyquil.readthedocs.io/en/stable/

Beta invite request link - http://forest.rigetti.com/

Did I just hear “almost”?

I'm a little worried about these companies over-hyping the current state of capability. For sure, this is an exciting time though, and I am certainly optimistic about the long-term prospects. Anyone interested would do well to read [0]

[0] https://arxiv.org/abs/1801.00862

So we're not yet at a point where we can show that a quantum computer can do anything at all faster than a classical computer - and this guy already plans his datacenter for the upcoming quantum AWS.

I'd say he's confusing step 20 with step 2 or something...

Normally I'd agree with you, but some of the breakthroughs in this space over the last 18 month make it clear that it's not an "if," but a "when." They're positioning to be right there when the moment happens.

Got any sources? I have not seen anything that promises anything.

This reminds me of the carbon nanotube hype, when they we're going to be the best at everything from batteries to bulletproof vests. There are currently 0 CN products on the market, and it is not clear there ever will be.

Betting on an undiscovered technology that isn't proven to exist is far form a sure thing.

Research in carbon nanotubes only really matured from fundamental to applied in the past 15 years, so I don't think it's that surprising that the market isn't flooded with them yet.

We're already seeing some of the first commercially available CNT products, though. Take Vantablack[0] as an example. Or for non-commercial applications of CNT tech, see the CNT-reinforced bicycle frame that Floyd Landis used to win the Tour de France in 2006.[1]

When you consider that Bakelite was invented in 1907, but didn't see major manufacture until the 1940s, or that PVC was discovered in the 1870s, but didn't see commercial production until almost the same time, it doesn't seem like CNT are much behind the timeline for plastics. The entire chemical and plastics revolution didn't really take swing until the 1960s.

CNT probably aren't vaporware, and even if they were I don't know if that'd be too damning a story for Quantum Computers. Quantum Computing isn't "undiscovered" or "[not] proven to exist." Plenty of labs have produced physical quantum logic gates, and IBM even makes access to some of their real 5- and 16-qubit machines available online through the cloud.[2]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vantablack

[1] https://archive.fo/20120713061226/http://news.cnet.com/Carbo...

[2] https://quantumexperience.ng.bluemix.net/qx

Between Google (https://www.zdnet.com/article/googles-quantum-computing-brea...), Oxford (https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/ne...) and Intel (https://www.extremetech.com/computing/261734-intel-unveils-n...) so far this year alone, indications are becoming increasingly clear that there's something here.

I'd definitely take that bet were I a VC. Note that they've raised about the same amount so far as Juicero did...

That's not true at all. Scaling quantum computers is exponentially hard - each bit is twice as hard to keep coherent as the last.

And the higher-qubit demos you've heard about have quite low fidelity, meaning they'll need multiple physical qubits to represent each logical qubit.

When a problem scales like 2^(2x), you can easily reach an insurmountable barrier. I'm not saying they will, mind you.

"That's not true at all. Scaling quantum computers is exponentially hard - each bit is twice as hard to keep coherent as the last."

I am very interested to know if that is the case. From my perspective, your claim seems like an intuitively obvious application of TANSTAAFL, but there are experts who actually understand quantum physics who think otherwise. Layman's intuition is not to be trusted. Therefore quantum computing remains tantalizingly more plausible to me than, say, cold fusion.

The keyword to google for here is "quantum supremacy". There is for example this paper https://arxiv.org/abs/1608.00263

It might not just be “faster”. It could also be “better” (obtaining more accurate results than you otherwise could), or “cheaper” (obtaining results with less money, less memory, less electricity, ...). Power consumption, for instance, is a huge factor in the design of modern supercomputers and data centers. If you can do useful tasks 50% slower but using 5% of the energy you’d consume with a “full speed” solution, I’d say that’s a win.

They're designing the computer. They know exactly which problems they are targeting. Yes there's risk, but this isn't proceeding on blind hope.

Yep. Sounds like their cloud is literally made of vapour.

If you build it, they will come. More seriously, once it becomes obvious how it will be used, they will no longer be ahead. A good counterpoint though is what if they build it based on current designs which require some radically different setup than the future designs that will be worth it.

the other possibility is that they do know something that isn't widely known about quantum computing.

We already know that a capable quantum computer can do a lot of things faster than a classical computer and it's undoubtedly going to happen within the next couple decades if not sooner. I think he's just planning ahead and riding the bleeding edge technology.

Edit: Thanks everyone for pointing out a flaw in my opinion. For anyone actually interested in delving into the discussion of whether or not quantum computing is faster than classical computing https://cstheory.stackexchange.com/questions/24943/is-there-...

That's actually incorrect. Many people believe a quantum computer may be more powerful than a classical computer, but that is definitely not proven and plenty of people also believe that may not be true.

Well, for certain classes of problems, it is certainly proven that quantum algorithms are faster than classical algorithms. And they're not totally theoretical pie-in-the-sky; you can implement a 5- or 16-qubit version of Shor's algorithm in IBM Q Experience[0] and run it on a real, physical quantum computer. The growing pains are in implementing quantum computers that are large enough to be of practical importance, and then building those systems several-fold larger for Quantum Fault Tolerance.[1]

Quantum computers are never going to replace or speed up every aspect of classical computation, but the idea of accessing them as a service for certain types of computation is probably not many decades off.

[0] https://quantumexperience.ng.bluemix.net/proxy/tutorial/full...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_error_correction

There are quantum algorithms for certain problems that are exponentially faster than any known classical algorithm, and there are good reasons to believe that BQP is not contained in BPP, but we don't have proof of that yet as far as I know.

(Technically we still don't really know whether physics actually allows quantum computers with more than a few bits. Quantum mechanics says yes, but the universe can still veto.)

>it is certainly proven that quantum algorithms are faster than classical algorithms.

yes. What isn't proven is that actual implementation of quantum algorithms would be fast enough (i.e. while a given quantum algorithm may be order of magnitude faster using the number of steps/operations a the metric, may it happen that the runtime (using time as the metric) of those quantum steps may take order of magnitude longer ?). There is some indications that various corrections/etc. have to grow faster than linear with the number of qubits.

Theranos rode the bleeding edge of technology until they ran out of edge.

Theranos style cloud quantum computing - run the simulation on classic and sell the result as quantum result.

also blood!

A quantum datacenter? I hope they've got a healthy budget for speeding tickets. "We know exactly where it is, but have no idea how fast it's going!" XD

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