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Comment by fsh | Hacker News Reader

I find the editorialized title misleading. They trapped 17000 atom pairs in an optical lattice and demonstrated a high-fidelity quantum gate between the atoms of each pair in parallel. There is no interaction between the atoms of different pairs and no individual control. The experiment demonstrates a very robust gate scheme, but is a long way from a programmable computer.

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Submitted title was "ETH Zurich demonstrates 17,000 qubit array with 99.91% fidelity". We've changed it now.

Submitters: "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize." (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) If you want to say what you think is important about an article, that's fine, but do it by adding a comment to the thread. Then your view will be on a level playing field with everyone else's: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

With the hype QC these days, I find it hard to separate hype from real progress.

Reminds me the state of nuclear fusion.

Just a decade away now.

That's progress, if fusion is always only 10 years away now! The running joke used to be that it was always 30 years away.

Fusion is a number of dollars away, not years. It gets almost no funding because it’sa science and engineering experiment that most likely will not lead to economically viable power plants in a market dominated by renewables.

… and like fusion it will be a decade away, a decade away, a decade away, six months away, then we have it.

The “decade away” phenomenon comes from the fact that it’s basically impossible to time estimate innovation.

I went to school in Oxfordshire in the '80s. Some visiting profs from JET joked that fusion was 25 years away then.

Back then things were centered around "can we even do this?" and now it's more of "how do we keep this running more than 5 minutes?".

My impression back then from those profs was that it (fusion) would be inevitable but you do have to think long term, really long term. I'm old enough now (55) to understand that mentality.

I'd put money on something useful fusion related happening within the next 10 years or perhaps 20. I'm not up on the current state of experiments etc but it will happen.

AGI? - lol!

AFAIK superconductors are a major limiting tech. But we are slowly getting better ones, both by discovering more and by learning to mass produce superconducting wire.

With superconductors you can make magnetic bottles.

There’s also some interesting inertial confinement work happening. There the limiter is both confinement and the efficiency of the driver. Look up MagLIF for a hybrid magnetic inertial approach under study.

... and room temperature superconductors! If only we could sort out the feasibility, interdependencies, and priorities, but we just don't know, or well, I just don't know haha.

That's String Theory providing "answers", no?

So just like AI?

They should ask Iran to do it, they're only a month away all the time.

Nah, it's a decade away from *now*.

nahhh, definately from *now* though - 100% this time

Now now or Just now?

* I've worked with too many Sth Africans.

For those of us who aren't familiar, what is the difference?

The difference is how soon it might occur, except "now" can also mean they never get around to it.

"Right now" is probably the only one that literally means now as the rest of the English-speaking world would assume.

most of them live in a different time zone

The ETH article title is actually fine - "a new trick brings stability."

The hype is in the HN title.

That’s why we have “reading”. Literally the first paragraph. So in this case, pretty easy to separate.

In case others are confused: the old HN title has been changed, and the new HN title is directly from the paper (and definitely not overhyped).

Reading the ETHZ article as well as the paper, they both seem pretty accurate and descriptive. Really sad HN is not discussing the actual cool research that was done, but not surprised since physics is outside HN's core competencies.

ETHZ news page is always overhyped. There is good research coming from there but their marketing is never worth reading.

What is overhyped about: "A new trick brings stability to quantum operations". Are people complaining about the HN title as if it's the article's title?

Yes

its still more than my nephew managed to achieve this morning

I have questions. Is he attempting to build a quantum gate array? Seems kind of unfair to compare one person's efforts with a well-established university, if so. :P

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