Hacker News Reader

Comment by setquk | Hacker News Reader

Sounds like Fusion. That’s still going on after 60 odd years.

We know that fusion is possible. We have H-bombs. We have various things that do small scale fusion. Getting out more power than is put in remains way out of reach.

I take the point, while noting H-bombs put out more power than is put in. Perhaps "getting more useful power out..."?

With one major difference. We know that fusion in some form is possible (for example, in the sun, or in a hydrogen-bomb). The difficulty is doing it at a reasonable scale. It's less clear that quantum computing is possible.

I mean we already have quantum computers too. https://quantumexperience.ng.bluemix.net/qx/experience The trouble here is also scaling, but in the upward direction.

The "quantum computers" we have are classical computers with very weird hardware. The thing everybody is trying to achieve is quantum supremacy - this hasn't been achieved or demonstrated yet, and might never will be.

For at least a very, very long time, I see Quantum Computers as simply being "accelerators" that do very niche tasks. Like GPUs or FPGAs today. I'm sure one day we'll have a whole other paradigm, but I doubt Quantum Computing as we envision it today will be the thing that replaces x86-compatible silicon.

They are not classical computers. We've had actual quantum logic gates since 1995. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_quantum_computing And as linked above, IBM is renting out time on real quantum computers up to 17 qubits now. Intel, Google, and IBM had all announced plans for 49 or 50 qubit computers, which would have achieved quantum supremacy at the time, but IBM improved their simulator to 56 qubits last year. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_supremacy So we're only one or two hardware generations away now.

They are classical computers in the sense they are are no stronger than classical computers - they provide a different physical implementation, but computationally can't achieve anything that a classical computer can't. Everything those "quantum computers" do can be simulated with a classical computer. The entire motivation behind the development of QC is supremacy, and the existence of those "quantum computers" alone doesn't provide any proof that supremacy is possible - so it is definitely not just a question of scale.

Google already has a 72 qubit processor (Bristlecone), but whether they or anybody will be able to demonstrate supremacy in the current, next, or some future generation is entirely conjectural. The main limit is error correction, and there are theoretical arguments (Gil Kalai) for why achieving supremacy might be impossible.

Well I don't want to get into a full-on argument in the comments here, but I 100% disagree with your definition of a quantum computer. If a computer uses quantum logic gates then it's a quantum computer.

It’s not particularly important how you define the term “quantum computer”, nor have I presented any definition of a "quantum computer" that you can disagree with. The point is that, as I wrote before, regardless of your definition - currently there is no discernible advantage of quantum computers over classical computers in the only metric that matters: computational power. This is what people refer to when they talk about the impossibility of QC. Nobody has demonstrated that physically realizable quantum computers can solve BQP problems in polynomial time, or provide any superpolynomial speedups over classical computers, and there is certainly no proof that this is simply a matter of scale.

Grover's algorithm runs faster than any classical algorithm can https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grover%27s_algorithm and it was first run on quantum hardware in 1998 according to the timeline I posted above. Literally the only difference between the state of the art and quantum supremacy is scale.

Now you are simply posting incorrect or misleading information. There is no existing implementation of Grover's algorithm on quantum hardware that demonstrated any speedup over classical computers. In fact the largest implementation of Grover's algorithm to date, on ibmqx5, has an unusable error rate.

> Literally the only difference between the state of the art and quantum supremacy is scale.

This is simply incorrect. At the moment it's unclear that quantum supremacy can be achieved at any scale whatsoever, and it's certainly possible that it's unachievable even in principle.

You might say that's the case with Fusion as well :)

You can literally sign up for D-Wave Leap and run problems on a quantum computer immediately. It's not gate-model, but it's a real quantum annealer that functions and can compute useful things.

Quantum annealers are not quantum computers. They are not more powerful than classical computers. You either need the "gate model" or the equivalent "adiabatic quantum computing model" to achieve something infeasible on classical computers.

It is a common misconception to think that adiabatic quantum computing (which is equivalent to the gate model) and quantum annealing is the same thing. It is not, and quantum annealing is mostly a buzzword that D-Wave use to sell their devices.

If something sounds too good to be true, it probably is.

Sulfa. White swans do come along, they're just incredibly rare.

Are they rare, or do they just happen over longer timeframes than we want? Just about any mainstream technology today would appear to be too good to be true to someone ~100 years ago. Air travel, television, computers, phones.

The telephone was invented in 1876, practically old hat a hundred years ago. Air travel was 1903, was around longer than Facebook has been around in 2018. I guess it comes down to your definition of rare, but it's certainly rare enough.

Black swans are rare.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com