I expect this won't be the last time we hear about quantum research that has been foundational to a lot of work turns out to have been manipulated, or designed poorly and unverified by other research labs.
Its a shame. I was really looking forward to finding out what the prime factors of 34 are.
34 requires 6 bits, though
"As pointed out in [57], there has never been a genuine implementation of Shor’s algorithm. The only numbers ever to have been factored by that type of algorithm are 15 and 21, and those factorizations used a simplified version of Shor’s algorithm that requires one to know the factorization in advance..."
If you have a clue what these factors are, you can build an implementation of Shor's algorithm for them, I guess.
[1] https://fixupx.com/CraigGidney/status/1907199729362186309
Meanwhile, a networking company wants to "network" these chips - what does that even mean ? And a gpu company produces a library for computing with quantum.
Smoke-and-mirrors can carry on for a long time, and fool the best of them. Isaac Newton was in on the alchemist bandwagon.
I'm maybe a little jaded having worked on whole products that had no market success, but were in fact just so that the company had something new to talk about.
1. 100% secure communication channels (even better we can detect any attempt at eavesdropping and whatever information is captured will be useless to the eavesdropper)
2. Building larger quantum computers. A high fidelity quantum network would allow you to compute simultaneously with multiple quantum chips by interfacing them.
The thing that makes quantum networking different from regular networking is that you have to be very careful to not disturb the state of the photons you are sending down the fiber optics.
Im currently doing my PhD building quantum networking devices so im a bit biased but I think it’s pretty cool :).
Now does it matter I’m not sure. Reason 1 isn’t really that useful because encryption is very secure. However if quantum computers start to scale up and some encryption methods get obsoleted this could be nice. Also having encryption that is provably secure would be nice regardless.
Reason 2 at the moment seems like the only path to building large scale quantum computing. Think a datacenter with many networked quantum chips.
1. What is it about quantum computers that can guarantee 100% secure communication channels?
2. If the communications are 100% secure, why are we worried about eavesdropping?
3. If it can detect eavesdropping, why do we need to concern ourselves with the information they might see/hear? Just respond to the detection.
4. What is it about quantum computing that would make an eavesdroppers’ overheard information useless to them, without also obviating said information to the intended recipients?
This is where the language used to discuss this topic turns into word salad for me. None of the things you said necessarily follow from the things that were said before them, but rather just levied as accepted fact.
This seems like a decent overview if you want to learn more: https://www.chalmers.se/en/centres/wacqt/discover-quantum-te....
> According to the laws of quantum physics, it is impossible to measure or copy an unknown state of a quantum particle without noticeably changing it.
That alone is a very clear description of how quantum mechanics is pseudoscience. Its based entirely on an untestable principle. When the initial state can't be measured because doing so changes the state we are left entirely unable to run a controlled study on it. You must know Tue state before and after an intervention to reliably and accurately deduce what happened or to begin to understand why it happened.
This is the one miracle that we must grant to allow the rest of quantum research to become possible.
We can simulate a quantum computer using a normal computer (in exponential time). Simulations of tiny quantum computers agree with the experiments using tiny quantum computers. We can also simulate less-tiny (but still pretty small because it takes exponential time) quantum computers. But we haven't built an actual one of those yet. It seems they're really hard to build But also no fundamental reason is known why it should be impossible to build one. Shouldn't it just be the same as a tiny one, but bigger? The tiny ones were hard enough to build, so maybe it's just really hard and we need better techniques.
Perhaps it will turn out to be a failed branch of science that leads to no practical applications, but it's certainly real science, studying real things and making testable predictions (which are true so far). I suppose your next objection will be that since we only have tiny quantum computers, non-tiny problems are pseudoscience, but that's like saying particle physics was pseudoscience before we built the Large Hadron Collider.
Recently 3Blue1Brown made a video attempting to explain Grover's algorithm, which is one of the main applications of quantum computing, that also covers basic ideas of quantum computing and some common misconceptions - have you seen it yet? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RQWpF2Gb-gU and followup: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dlsa9EBKDGI
A simulation is an interesting indicator for future scientific research, but it is never scientific research in and of itself.
2. Because they're not 100% secure. Only the key exchange step with an authenticated endpoint is 100% secure.
3. Eavesdropping acts like a denial of service and breaks all communications on the channel.
4. It makes the information useless to everyone, both the eavesdropper and the recipients. Attempting to eavesdrop on a QKD channel randomizes the transmitted data. It's a DOS attack. The easier DOS attack is to break the fiber-optic cable transmitting the light pulses, since every endpoint needs a dedicated fiber to connect to every other endpoint.
It's 100% secure in theory, assuming a model of the hardware (which is impossible to verify even if you could build it to "perfectly" satisfy all model assumptions, which of course you also can't).
The Q part is secure in theory, assuming your devices satisfy a specific theoretical model. That's not a 100% guarantee. In fact, it's just the same kind of guarantee as we get for any other security system: "We carefully examined the system and it seems like it satisfies the assumptions of our theoretical model, thus promising security".
Not that this is a bad thing, it's just that "quantum" doesn't make anything "magically 100% secure". There's no such thing as "100% security".
Still trying to figure out what is going on. Are they preposition for the upcoming breakthroughs and until then it will be like the beginning in AI where many claimed to have it but actually just pretended. Additionally they likely want to access the money flow.
An often overlooked or unmentioned fact too!
I think its a shame, because it humanizes the (for lack of a better term) smartest people in history to know these things about them.
Yes, Newton invented calculus, but he also tried to turn lead into gold!
So you too, might be able to do something novel, is the idea.
Or how the "perpetual motion machine" (by the same guy, Cornelis Drebbel) led to barometers and the discovery of atmospheric pressure. (Also connected to astrology because astrologers were the ones making predictions, including of weather.)
EDIT : bonus soundtrack : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jy99ywCp3qU
(> it is only a small subset of this song, a fully differentiable song will come in the future)
There are maybe other reasons to invest, but this caused me to sell my shares
This research wasn't foundational to a lot of work. Most of important/foundational works in quantum (doesn't matter if computing or general, I'm not sure which one you meant) are verified. How can you possibly base your experimental work on someone else's work if you can't replicate it?
I agree with you, its a terrible idea to base your work on someone else's when it hasn't been well confirmed in independent research.
I consider the source work in the OP as foundational because Microsoft built so much work and spent so many resources building on top of it. It's not foundational to the entire field but it is foundational to a lot of follow-up research.
It's not about whether it's good or bad idea. To make follow-up experiments you need to first reproduce the original experiment. That's why faking "big" experiments like Schön could never work.
> Microsoft built so much work and spent so many resources building on top of it. It's not foundational to the entire field but it is foundational to a lot of follow-up research.
Will all due respect, a single group (even large one) doing a single type of experiments (even important and complicated one) is not a lot of research. Also, Microsoft knew about data manipulation, that why they moved the experiments in house. They didn't do experiments under assumption that the early Majorana papers are correct, then they wouldn't need to develop their own complicated (and somewhat controversial) protocol to detect Majoranas. It was quite clear for everyone that regardless of data manipulation people were too optimistic interpreting Majorana signatures in these early papers.
Would you rather I make that blanket claim so you can rightfully call me out for not understanding some part of the mathematical theory or nomenclature instead?
Scaling is itself the open question. Gravitational effects start creeping in when you scale up sensitive entangled systems and we don't have a good understanding of how gravity interacts with entanglement. Entangled systems above a certain size may just be impossible.
All of the examples of macroscopic effects above are possible thanks to effects explainable only through the existence of superposition. It is just that they are not particularly controllable and thus not of interest for storing quantum information.
Another fun point: the example you are focusing on, fusion happening in the sun, is only possible due to the quantum tunneling effect, which is itself dependent on "superposition" being a real thing. Looking past the clouds at our star is already an example of quantum mechanics working, which is very much an experimental observation of an effect possible only thanks to the existence of superposition.
But doesn't the point stand? I meant to say that none of the examples seem to demonstrate both 1) and 2). Do we know of any natural system which can maintain and precisely manipulate a quantum state like a quantum computer needs to?
You cannot observe the initial state because that collapses the super position. Said more simply, we can only see the end result and make educated guesses as to how it happened and what the state was prior to the experiment.
The most accurate and expirimentaly tested theory of reality is "smoke and mirrors".
There are so many other areas to say that about, even in physics. But this?...
Your words sounds like what people said in the 40s and 50s about computers.
I'm not the OP, but when you're of a certain age, you don't need citations for that. Memory serves. And my family was saying those sorts of things and teasing me about being into computers as late as the 1970's.
By your own criteria, a citation better than "me" is needed.
Computing was already a huge industry. Just IBM's revenues were in the multi billion dollar range in the 1970s. And a billion dollar in the 1970s was A LOT of money in the 1970s.
Quite the opposite, in fact. It was pointing out that some supposed scams do turn out to be useful.
The Navy, Air Force, government, private institutions, etc didn't dump billions of funding into computers because they thought they were overrated.
They've been plugging along at quantum computers for decades now and have not produced a single useful machine (although a lot of the math and science behind it has been useful for theoretical physics).
Ballistics tables, decryption of enemy messages, and more. Early programmable general-purpose electronic computers, from the moment they were turned on could solve problems in minutes that would take human computers months or years. In the 40s, ENIAC proved the feasibility of thermonuclear weaponry.
By 1957 the promise and peril of computing entered popular culture with the Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn film "Desk Set" where a computer is installed in a library and runs amok, firing everybody, all while romantic shenanigans occur. It was sponsored by IBM and is one of the first instances of product placement in films.
People knew "electronic brains" were the future the second they started spitting out printouts of practically unsolvable problems instantly-- they just didn't (during your timeframe) predict the invention and adoption of the transistor and its miniaturization, which made computers ubiquitous household objects.
Even the quote about the supposed limited market for computers trotted out from time-to-time to demonstrate the hesitance of industry and academia to adopt computers is wrong.
In 1953 when Thomas Watson said that "there's only a market for five computers" what he actually said was "When we developed the IBM 701 we created a customer list of 20 organizations who might want it and because it is so expensive we expected to only sign five deals, but we ended up signing 18" (paraphrased).
Militaries, universities, and industry all wanted all of the programmable general-purpose electronic computers they could afford the second it became available because they all knew that it could solve problems.
Included for comparison is a list of problems that quantum computing has solved:
The current state of quantum computers is so much worse than that. It's not just that they have produced zero useful results. It's that when these quantum computers do produce results on toy problems, the creators are having a very hard time even proving the results actually came from quantum effects.
https://www.reddit.com/r/QuantumComputing/comments/1535lii/w...