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Comment by krastanov | Hacker News Reader

I guess I should be more careful when using handwavy terms. "Long-lived" does not have a defined meaning, so in my second answer I spelled out what you can do with a bunch of "logical" qubits and with a bunch of "physical" qubits, providing clear definitions of these words. I am not sure why you are so angry about the use of a handwavy term though, given the whole point of this thread was to introduce the topic to lay people. Either way, the second comment is clear and it avoids the ill defined terms, so hopefully you would be happy with it if you read it in its full length. There is no such thing as "full stop period" qubits, hence the confusion.

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>There is no such thing as "full stop period" qubits, hence the confusion.

of course there is - this is just more of exactly the same word play lol

>In 1995, Ben Schumacher provided an analogue to Shannon’s noiseless coding theorem, and in the process defined the ‘quantum bit’ or ‘qubit’ as a tangible physical resource

...

> For our elementary coding system we choose the two-level spin system, which we will call a "quantum bit" or qubit.

you can talk about surface plasmons or transmons or josephson junctions or whatever you want but the definition is always physical not logical (that's an abstraction!).

>I am not sure why you are so angry

I'm not angry - I already said what I am and that's tickled/mirthful but also bemused by the consistent evasion by the QC community to talk about physical reality.

So I think the truth is I'm not angry but you're defensive because a 100 qubit QC is useless, and moreso a 1000 qubit, even 100,000 qubit QC would be as well. But that's quite inconvenient for a research community that's publishing papers and submitting grant proposals.

You are making up claims about what people say and then get angry/tickled/mirthful about those made up claims. All throughout this thread people working in the field explicitly say that you can not use this device for simulating chemistry or factoring numbers and admit that you need at least about a million physical qubits (about a thousand logical qubits) to start doing these things reliably. How can you then claim that we are trying to hide it because it is "inconvenient"? This is the big thing to solve in our field, mentioned in every single research proposal, not some hidden secret we are ashamed of. And your refusal to distinguish physical and logical qubits is just silly and leading to your confusion.

>And your refusal to distinguish physical and logical qubits is just silly and leading to your confusion.

...bruh i'm a phd student whose work supports SQMS at fermilab (not in physics but cs). i'm not confused about absolutely any of the terms or definitions. hint: you're not the only QC researcher in the room at all times.

>You are making up claims about what people say and then get angry/tickled/mirthful about those made up claims.

i'm not making anything up - this comment

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29245025

doesn't say absolutely anything about error correction and just vaguely alludes to coherent qubits being somehow different from physical qubits. like are you kidding me claiming that you're being transparent while reporting 100 anything without immediately revealing that it's actually 100k? somehow in your mind 3 orders of magnitude isn't a big deal when communicating relevancy/value/merit?

for a farcical analogy: can you imagine me reporting 100 dead corps and then come to find out i'm talking about 100 corporations being massacred, each corporation employing 1000 people.

there is no other academic discipline that plays this slight-of-hand. i'll give you another analogy that should be near and dear to your heart and will illustrate the point very precisely: can you imagine daniel simon saying he proved separation of BQP and BPP and not immediately (in the same sentence) revealing that it was oracle separation?

Again, read that series of comments again. I am saying I would be excited to work with a device with 100 physical qubits, not 100k. You are making up the least charitable possible interpretation of an offhand comment and getting angry at your imagination.

lololol you keep dancing around the issue - now we're on to comparing "excited" to "useful"; the question wasn't what you're excited to work with (i'm excited to work with 5 qubits through qiskit). the question, plain as day:

>what's the smallest useful (as in, 'non-toy', or maybe 'worth buying time on') quantum computer?

very obviously this person isn't asking about useful for writing papers...

>You are making up the least charitable possible interpretation of an offhand comment

nothing imagined here. just english. sorry.

> and getting angry at your imagination.

lol you keep insisting i'm angry. i mean if a reviewer reviews your submission and calls you out for inflating numbers i guess they're angry too? oh well

You are splitting hairs and picking arbitrary ways to interpret what I am saying. I would be excited, it would be useful, it would be great to work with a 100 physical qubits, so that we can test control schemes, small error correction procedures, maybe some entanglement purificant circuits, etc. You are willfully misinterpreting at this point.

no you are willfully misinterpreting this question posed by a layman

>what's the smallest useful (as in, 'non-toy', or maybe 'worth buying time on') quantum computer?

this question is not about papers or research - it is about value for problems/questions outside QC. simple as that. the answer to that question is ~100,000 physical qubits not 100.

again this whole exchange with you just further reaffirms that there's a very very strong reality distortion field around this entire area of academia.

And if you actually read my answer you see that I agree and in the first paragraph say that you would need around 1M physical qubits for anything practical!? The second paragraph specifically says it is about researchers in the field trying to push the field forward, playing with 100 physical qubits (yes, that usually involves writing papers).

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