Trump administration establishes $75M quantum computing centers

Advisors make these recommendations. Say the right words about the US falling behind China or national security risk and no one wants to be the person on record who said no to this.

I agree. It'd be concerning if they launched with some obscene $1 billion type financial tag with it.

If or when it makes sense, they can always increase funding for these three centers and or to build additional centers. Which is exactly what I'd expect in the coming years.

>It's the sort of fundamental research which private industry tends to under-produce because it's hard for any given company to recoup the full value of the R&D, but the target area is something with potential downstream practical implications.

Quantum computing ? I've seen just a few months ago some article about a single start-up raising >200M ?

>preceded by the words lack of or similar.

Eh, bipartisan stuff still happens. Look at the military industrial complex. Expanding executive power, expanding the surveillance state. Pro wall street regulation repeal.

Usually its to screw us

Wonder if Peter Thiel had a hand in it.

To zeroth order, it works out to roughly 30 small research groups for 5 years.

At a place like Berkeley, where I did my PhD (but not in anything quantum related), a PhD student and a postdoc both cost a professor something like $75k/year in salary and benefits (money not spent on postdoc salary basically goes to student tuition). Add in the professors salary as well (which is often substantially supported by grants), figure $150k/year for the prof. So in people costs alone, let’s say 1 professor and 2 trainees, that’s about $300k/year, or $1.5M/5 years. Multiply by 30 professors supported, and you’re at $45M, which is 60% of the $75M. And yeah, this is assuming that experiments are free.

Now is 20-30 professors a lot? If sufficiently narrow and esteemed, absolutely. There were 29 people at the 1927 Solvay Conference. Give them an extra couple months where they aren’t sweating a grant, and that’s a lot of time to think.

That seems like a perverse incentive.

I think these overhead numbers are quoted as the percentage on top of what gets spent, rather than the percentage of the incoming cash. 50% overhead means that buying a 1M machine involves giving 500K to the institution.

(Still crazy high, of course!)

$75M is rounding error compared to anything being discussed in the vicinity of the pandemic; I wouldn't really expect it to enter into the conversation.

Quantum computers are modeled with extremely basic linear algebra. Quantum states are vectors and gates are matrices which multiply those vectors to get new vectors. How much simpler do you want? You can explain most of it as rotations around the unit circle which we all learn in high school or earlier.

The problem is pop science crap that tries to explain superposition and entanglement with complete word salad instead of "linear combination" and "product vector cannot be factored into tensor product of single-qbit states", respectively.

Anyway it is extremely doubtful that more programmers will need to learn how to program a quantum computer than, say, will need to learn how to program a GPU. They're both useful co-processors for very specific workloads. Programming will remain a fundamentally classical endeavor.

> Quantum networking

Any recommended reading materials on this?

NIST is already well into a post-quantum crypto competition. Any serious user of cryptography will have switched to the new protocols by the time quantum computers become powerful enough to crack production RSA. Cloudflare has already prototyped protocols in TLS [0]. Scott Aaronson has gone on record saying he would be "astonished" if this happened within a decade.

This isn't like the cold war days. The quantum computing research community is close-knit and people would notice researchers being hoovered up by the NSA; this hasn't happened.

Shor's algorithm is undeniably a groundbreaking result but is not the killer app of quantum computers. It's more of an unfortunate side-effect.

[0] https://blog.cloudflare.com/the-tls-post-quantum-experiment/

This is about setting curriculums at universities and student grants.

Haters gonna hate. John Martinis at Google did a very good job for silencing those deniers.

This isn't the US's only quantum computing project or gov't funding.

Doesnt "the workforce" in quantum computing consist of physics PhDs anyways.

It's tempting to dismiss that write-up due to its incendiary style, but I find that many of its "factory floor" level insights ring true to me.

As an experimentalist, I would agree with the sentiment that the potential future applications of Quantum computing probably receive too much media attention, given the maturity level of existing technology.

The technical arguments as to why building a useful QC will be impossible are a bit more shaky.

First, the post seems to imply that the calibration effort scales with the number of gates in the algorithm. This is false. In reality, the number of interactions that need individual calibration is basically the number of qubit-qubit pairs exposed by the gate library. The most mainstream approach to error-corrected QC only uses nearest-neighbor interactions, and hence the scaling is linear.

Second, it is not clear to me why the number of computational basis states (2^N) is relevant to the engineering at all. Following this line of thinking, the recent Quantum supremacy result by Google already amounted to a mastery of 2^53 ~ 10^16 degrees of freedom.

Third, an argument is made that large-scale error correction will not work because of correlated errors, of unspecified nature. I think a claim like this should come with a mention of at least one concrete source of such errors, so that we could estimate its magnitude and potential severity. Note that such calculations are almost the essence of day-to-day work of a physicist.

In the absence of more detail, I can make a generic counterargument: Any phenomenon causing such correlated errors by definition affects multiple physical qubits at once, and will tend to be more macroscopic in nature. This is in contrast with the processes that limit the fidelity of one- and two-qubit operations, which is what the error-correcting code will take care of. Macroscopic disturbances are exactly the ones that we can attempt to shield against with clever engineering.

It's common to refer to an administration by the name of the current President than "the US government," particularly within the US where the Hill is based. You can find numerous references for example to the "Obama Administration, Clinton Adminstration, Bush Administration, etc" in the media.

There's no "agenda" at work here, you're just being needlessly paranoid.

> "The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and the National Science Foundation (NSF) announced Tuesday the establishment of three quantum computing centers across the nation, involving an investment of $75 million."

It was a White House initiative, so the headline seems to be accurate.

If the administration deserves the blame when it does something bad, it deserves the credit when it does something good.

The Hill is focused primarily on Washington politics so 75% of the stories are about the Administration/House/Senate/Supreme Court/Agency putting out a press release or taking some procedural step.

Turn on any NPR News broadcast over at least the past two decades and the first story will invariably start "The ______ administration…", regardless of who's in office.

It is a neutral headline. I don't sense any agenda one way or the other.

Meta: whilst the title itself is a standard, neutral way for a political news site like TheHill to report a government's decisions, this is one case where editing the title for HN submission might help focus the discussion on the quantum computing initiative rather than the Trump administration. I say that as someone who's considerably more enthusiastic than the average HNer about content on here which is inherently political in nature