Comment by K0SM0S | Hacker News Reader

Comment by K0SM0S | Hacker News Reader

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Edit: I am definitely wrong about my interpretation (see child post by DashAnimal)

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Original comment for reference:

I really don't think IBM implied the social (and definitely modern, circumstancial) figurative meaning of supremacy.

Any tech geek, or history major for that matter, would just read it as "crushing domination", with a strong implication that others won't be able to catch up, ever. You know, like Kings and Empires impose their supremacy on other, lesser powers.

In that sense, the expression "quantum supremacy" (QS) is indeed ambiguous insofar as:

- it's a convention, a simple "we agree to say that QS means <mathematical definition>" (not a very clear one at that, the concept lacks boundaries).

- "supremacy" in QS refers to "quantum", i.e. it's the domination of Q computers versus classic computers; and absolutely not that of the company behind the tech —a recent history of the Fortune 500 makes it emphatically clear that there is no such thing as definitive supremacy for companies. In fact, a certain IBM... [snip]

Big blue is apparently vexed, here; but disingenuous linguistically? Not so much in my opinion. More like downplaying —that is their pettiness if you ask me: why not salute the engineering feat, and look at yourself asking "OK guys, how do we win the next step?" In other words, play it fair.

No, they definitely did. In the original blog:

> Professor Preskill summarized the two main objections to the term that have arisen from the community by explaining that the “word exacerbates the already overhyped reporting on the status of quantum technology” and that “through its association with white supremacy, evokes a repugnant political stance.”

> Both are sensible objections. And we would further add...

https://www.ibm.com/blogs/research/2019/10/on-quantum-suprem...

It's almost as if a word could have a different meaning depending on the other words surrounding it.

Oh, my. IBM is way lower than I thought. Thank you for setting my perception straight; I amended GP accordingly.

I would almost qualify that as intellectual self-subjection (and perhaps ethical, in the way of science). Aiming so low that it's trolling, for lack of a better word.

Wikipedia's "Quantum supremacy"[1] article:

> The term was originally popularized by John Preskill[2] but the concept of a quantum computational advantage, specifically for simulating quantum systems, dates back to Yuri Manin's (1980) and Richard Feynman's (1981) proposals of quantum computing.

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

[2]: https://arxiv.org/abs/1203.5813 (2012, in the abstract: “[...] we hope to hasten the day when well controlled quantum systems can perform tasks surpassing what can be done in the classical world. One way to achieve such "quantum supremacy" would be to run an algorithm on a quantum computer which solves a problem with a super-polynomial speedup relative to classical computers [...]”)

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