Comment by calhoun137 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by calhoun137 | Hacker News Reader

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I think we need to comes to grips with a hard truth about the reality of academic life. Once you invest decades of your life into a research subject, if it turns out the entire thing is never going to work, there are major social and financial pressures to deceive the public about the true nature of the subject.

I saw this happen with string theory first hand, and my experience with string theory was a major factor that led to changing paths to pure mathematics and computer science.

As someone who has spent a lot of time researching QC, I do not believe it will ever be possible to build a practical quantum computer. We have been over this so many times on this site. Here is a good link from a serious professional who takes the same position [1]

In fact, my personal opinion is that quantum computers are functionally, a hoax, the main purpose of which is to generate hype, secure research grants, ensure career stability for academics, and give science reporters something to write about to get clicks while deceiving the public.

[1] https://www.quantamagazine.org/gil-kalais-argument-against-q...

> Once you invest decades of your life into a research subject, if it turns out the entire thing is never going to work, there are major social and financial pressures to deceive the public about the true nature of the subject.

You're implying that Scott Aaronson is being deceptive.

I think that needs better evidence. The story you linked to is two years old and it's about QC skeptic Gil Kalai.

Scott addresses him directly in his post:

> If quantum supremacy was achieved, what would it mean for the QC skeptics?

> I wouldn’t want to be them right now! They could of course retreat to the position that of course quantum supremacy is possible (who ever claimed that it wasn’t??), that the real issue has always been quantum error-correction. And indeed, some of them have consistently maintained that position all along. But others, including my good friend Gil Kalai, are on record, right here on this blog predicting that even quantum supremacy can never be achieved for fundamental reasons. I won’t let them wiggle out of it now.

I am not very familiar with Scott Aaronson and am just making a general observation about the subject of QC, I have no idea what his motivations or intentions are. If Scott believes QC will day be practical and I don't, only time can tell who is right and who is wrong. I have seen this kind of goal post moving in string theory, and its been going on for 20 years with QC in a strikingly similar way imo.

There is no way to argue against this kind of goal post moving style of debate because even if another 20 years go by and QC still don't exist on a practical level, the goal posts will just keep getting moved.

I am extremely confident that this will continue until the public gets bored of hearing about it.

I think Scott is agnostic about whether QC will be practical or not. To quote the original article, "we have no idea how long it will take".

>"we have no idea how long it will take"

IMO, this is a reasonable position to take. However, we have to accept that even if a universal QC is possible, "how long" could conceivably be centuries.

Our perspective with regard to technology has been significantly biased by our experience with Moore's Law/Dennard Scaling. The speed of progress in ICs from 1960 to 2010 (and especially 1980-2000) is an outlier in the history of science and technology, yet we base expectations in everything from AI to QC on it.

I'm not a physicist. In my current mental picture, I also feel the exponential speed-up is a hoax.

Yet I have no trouble believing in this quantum supremacy at the current scale.

The way I see it is a quantum computer is "running" an algorithm like Toshiba's "simulated bifurcation". It's running it at a frequency much higher than current computers.

If I had to take a guess it is like running classically at the Bohr frequency of an electron ~10^16 Hz. So it's kind of like trying every combination with some heuristics. Currently we are tapping into this 6 additional order of magnitudes of computation, which allows a brute force search to appear instant. But once we have used this 10^6 speed factor the quantum computer will miss a lot of the solutions and you will have to increase the sampling time exponentially to find your solution. We are currently in the exponential part of the S curve.

You've got to understand that those machines are expensive to build, so putting a cap on the performance won't help you raise funds. But these machines are beautiful. They are some marvel of engineering. There are plenty of things to discover. They need to get built.

They will bring plenty of useful techniques in the how to manipulate and build very small things, and more importantly how to compute without releasing so much heat. But those advances will probably get locked into a few private companies by monopolizing the few big names that can lend the credibility required to raise funds.

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