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Comment by baby | Hacker News Reader

I'm starting to get some fatigue about quantum computer news, and I just dismiss them now. If there really is a valuable breakthrough, everyone will be talking about it for months non-stop so I won't miss it.

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This is exactly correct. The moment something important happens in quantum computing the community will recognize it as such. In the meantime most of us are just waiting for somebody to do something interesting that couldn't really have been solved (possibly approximately) on classical systems.

In that sense, this is a pretty big step because for the first time there is a quantum computer that cannot be simulated by a classical one. It's also expected they will have a processor with over 400qubits next year and over 1000 in 2 years. This are huge leaps.

Still they aren't currently doing anything useful and need to prove themselves.

I am surprised to see that growth given my intuition that each additional qubit would be harder than the previous to add to the system.

Are there any moores law type predictions/historical trackers for qubits?

My understanding is that adding qubits is not hard, but using them together is hard. Also, it sounded like some qubits are only added for error correction.

What are the innovations allowing for these large leaps? It seems like forever that progress was extremely slow.

Note: I'm a total laymen and have a single source of information, which I read just before seeing the article on hacker news:

https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/11/ibm-clears-the-100-q...

The Ars article goes into a little more technical detail (a little) than the press announcement.

I wouldn't trust the claim it can't be simulated; right after google declared quantum supremacy another group noticed that the classical solution was actually much faster than google said (and that's before any real optimization work gets started). https://arxiv.org/abs/2110.14502

Also as pointed out, these aren't full qubits, nor does any doubling mean the QC will suddenly be able to do anything useful.

That's kind of like saying, i'm tired of political news - if we all actually die in a nuclear holocaust armegedon it will be hard to miss.

It's not like political news. It's like new battery tech news.

If this was the 1600s and nobody had made a working battery yet, i would find battery tech news very interesting even if it was of the quasi-theoretical, only works in a lab, variety.

Actually, what you just said is the equivalent of saying, "We just developed a quantum computer that allows us to solve not just every physical world question we have, but every metaphysical one as well."

Since you're literally comparing the end of most life on Earth, I think its fair for me to compare the development of a computer that provides limitless understanding.

They're both equally ridiculous, in other words.

I feel like a nuclear war is a much likelier (yet very low probability) event than your computational straw man.

To be clear i am not saying they are equally likely.

In the near term (next 5-10 years) the end of the world/WW3 is much more likely than a quantum computer that can solve crypto as in use today (Say RSA 2048bit). I would say orders of magnitude more likely. That's not saying that nuclear war is likely, its just a statement about how unlikely practical implementation of shor algorithm is in the near term based on where we are today.

However, that said, its kind of besides the point. The point of the comparison is both events are really unlikely. Quibiling if its 1 in a million or 1 in hundred thousand is besides the point.

The news is interesting because its a step in that direction. Just like how news about destabilizing world events are interesting even if they aren't literal full war. Its a step on a path. The destination is decades away.

That's fair. So why are you posting in this thread? If you follow your strategy, you would save a lot of time no?

What I'm trying to say is please don't hijack HackerNews threads to just complain.

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