Physicists developing a quantum computer that’s entirely open source | Hacker News Reader

Physicists developing a quantum computer that’s entirely open source

physics.aps.org

193 pointstzury34 comments

Couldn't find any cost estimate, but from https://openquantumdesign.org/the-quantum-computer (scroll down to "What's Inside") I'm guessing 100's of k$ for the bill of materials (let alone keeping the thing going.)

So the "you" in "your own" has to have pretty deep pockets...for a relatively low fidelity 30 qubit device.

Okay so not a weekend project.

Most of the cost is in overpriced laser systems; if that gets solved a trapped-ion system could be reproduced for few tens of thousands of USDs. Still not a hobby weekend project, but certainly more attainable for more universities.

I was gonna say, at that price the cost in a University setting would be nothing in terms of the experience and teaching/learning opportunities provided. Game changer in terms of scaling education which bodes well for the future

> So the "you" in "your own" has to have pretty deep pockets...for a relatively low fidelity 30 qubit device.

Sure but once you buy it, all the "you"s in all the other universes get to have one too.

And yet they won't split the bill with me. Bunch of freeloaders.

Banking Company LLC presents: Quantum Loans™ "Your money is simultaneously yours and ours until you check your balance."

Superposition Financing: Your loan exists in all possible amounts until observed. Checking your balance collapses the wavefunction — so we recommend you simply... don't. Ignorance isn't just bliss, it's financially optimal.

Multiverse Co-signing: Split the debt across all versions of yourself in the multiverse. Sure, some of you will default — but statistically, infinite yous means infinite revenue for us.

Entangled Interest Rates: Your rate is entangled with a partner borrower chosen at random. If they pay on time, your rate drops.

Payment Clusters: Forget monthly installments. Payments arrive in probabilistic clusters — sometimes three in a week, sometimes none for a year. We can't predict when, and neither can you. It's not a bug, it's quantum mechanics.

The real joke here is how close these quips are to the reality of modern day financial markets. Specifically, lending and hedging, are time entangled and value within the markets exist in superposition.

If you want to try quantum vibecoding, I threw up a site at https://www.haiqu.org where you can mcp with the quantum computer at TU Delft. Free, after you make an account.

For those interested in the compiler/software stack and control hardware: https://pennylane.ai/blog/2025/12/open-source-quantum-comput...

This effort is likely aimed at industrial/academic entities and not "you" as in a single person. But anyway, it needs to be emphasized that the phrase "quantum computer" is today used to mean anything ranging from

-a useless machine that produces a signal indistinguishable from noise TO -a highly sophisticated marvel of science and engineering that performs otherwise impossible calculations

Many industrial quantum computers today fall closer to the the former category than the latter. A single person or small team with minimal funding has basically no hope of building anything meaningful.

I don't know of any other device that has such a broad range of quality represented under one name. Maybe like calling ELIZA and Opus 4.6 both "AI".

All “industrial” quantum computers currently fall entirely in the former category. Anyone trying to tell you otherwise is selling snake oil.

Is there a QC out there that can perform a commercially useful computation? No, not yet. And yes snake oil is abound. But the reality is not two categories, it's a spectrum. Some are more useless than others.

No, it's not a spectrum in any meaningful sense. There are scam companies (some with semi-respectable research departments attached to them) and there are research projects. Anyone selling devices with the promise that those devices will do anything useful for their customers are simply lying.

It's like fusion energy: there are legitimate companies working on the problem, and they may even succeed at some point, but anyone willing to deliver a 1MW fusion plant tomorrow is scamming you, because the technology doesn't work yet.

I have far more faith that fusion someday might be useful than I do for quantum computing.

The first QC that decrypts previously undecipherable text will have incalculable value to the government that surrounds it. QC companies are bullshit because they will take whatever free non-gov money they can, why not? They exist to absorb government money, rightly so, but their public profile is simply to get money from private sector sources

This, for sure - if there were any risk of quantum computers with 64 or 128 functional qubits, expansion would be a matter of engineering - the development of real, actual, functional quantum computing is on the order of nuclear weapons development. The US government would make it secret, take it over, and scale it up to 1024 bits for immediate and near total cyber dominance; something like pre-emptive strikes on bank accounts, total pwning of adversaries' secure systems, planting command and control malware everywhere, grabbing intelligence from anywhere the administration saw as valuable. There are a ton of dead drop encryptions. They could move btc from Satoshis wallets and wreck crypto value.

Quantum computing research you hear about is "neat lab experiment" fluff, or a demonstration of corporate technical acumen and research capabilities. You won't hear about real quantum computing until well after it's been used in geopolitical conflicts.

Better to link the hosting site - https://openquantumdesign.org/ - or maybe its githubs - https://github.com/OpenQuantumDesign too.

Only if you look at the license. Before that, it's in a superposition state of being closed and open sourced.

> But unlike commercial ventures, the plan is to give away all the intellectual property

I would prefer the term "share". "Give away" implies a single, proprietary enterprise could acquire and control it, which isn't "open source".

Incredibly cool initiative! Looks like they're going for a trapped-ion device, which the best you can get for now. It's not clear what kind of geometry the ions will be on, but I assume linear traps? If so, it can't be scaled beyond 10ish qubits, so that's definitely more of an educational project. That makes sense though, since the other options like racetrack or whatever are still active research.

I wonder if there's ever been any cross-pollinating between SC and trapped-ion labs when it comes to control electronics and such. This could be a good way to find out.

Do we have an example of a real quantum computer doing some kind of a computation that is not easily accessible by the regular computer?

I keep hearing about "the promise" and "achieving quantum supremacy" (again!), but is there a real example of a quantum machine doing something useful in real life?

The Venn diagram of "useful" and "not possible on a classical computer" has demonstrations on both disjoint ends but is currently empty in the intersection. For now. I fully sympathize with the hype-fatigue though.

What about Schor’s algorithm?

That's on the useful end but I don't think any QC has gone beyond being able to factor 14 or something in that neighborhood. Realistically we'd need a few thousand qubits to factor anything that's reasonable and current QCs have a dozen or so qubits that work.

no QC has gone beyond being able to factor 1.

The "factorization" done with quantum computers involved cherry picking special numbers so that a special "compiled" circuit (knowledge of the answer is required in order to do this) can be used instead of the full thing. That makes the semantics of the executed program "slightly" different.

What the claims say: factor(a,b)

What the implementation does: println("3").

Oh, I didn't realize that. I knew it was limited but not that limited. That's pretty misleading.

On the one hand you have strong and persistent claims about quantum factoring of large numbers

On the other hand you have

https://algassert.com/post/2500

Thank you for that. I had no idea, very interesting read!

No, there are none; the closest we currently have are various special purpose and more or less hard-coded machines that demonstrate that scaling exists; various general-purpose machines operating on handfuls of qubits demonstrating the various gates; and various snake oil scams that may or may not have semi-respectable research divisions associated with them.

Interesting, do you work in that field?

No. It's as if there's a "No computing with this shit" theorem, enforced by nature alongside "No FTL communications," "No hidden variables," "No, you can't build a transporter, not yours," and "No cloning."

https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg26735582-700-how-a-we...

> Do we have an example of a real quantum computer doing some kind of a computation that is not easily accessible by the regular computer?

Simulations of condensed matter simulations performed on QCs (google's OTOCs, quantinuum's HUbbard model) are not easily accessible by the regular computer. There are people working hard on simulating these results classically so it's quite likely they'll be simulated eventually. We're at point where classical computers are still in the race thanks to immense scale and algorithmic progress, but I think it won't be the case soon.

> something useful in real life?

usefulness is subjective. There are results that are potentially interesting to some people on Earth (as opposed to RCS).

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