Microsoft doubles down on controversial quantum computing claims
science.org
science.org
The switching behavior they see could just be an electron hopping on and off a quantum dot, perhaps one formed incidentally by part of the wirelike region, Legg says. “This is exactly what you could get from a quantum dot.”
Anyone want to give a layman-ish explanation of why aluminum versus lead makes such a huge difference?
When it comes to many of these systems relevant real world (e.g. quantum chemistry), classical heuristic-based approaches are already successful enough. For instance, you can run one of the simulations in Garnet Chan paper in a 10-15 minutes using some machine similar to DGX Spark to simulate FeMo-cofactor model within accepted quantum chemistry precisions.
I believe its biggest application will be to explore some areas in quantum information (e.g. quantum coherence), all the practical applications will be minor.
That is one will use normal computer to reformulate the task into a predefined form, submit that to quantum computer, and then use normal computer again to process the results.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/quantum/qsharp-overv...
Even if it will be practically possible to build quantum computers for average users (given they currently rely on complex physical experiments, one can doubt that), there's the question of whether there's a need for "mainstream" quantum computing.
As has often been said, quantum computers aren't some magical thing that makes every computation faster. They are faster at some very specific problems like breaking cryptography (I doubt that there's a mass market for decrypting the old WIFI traffic you stored from your neighbor, and, these days, most internet traffic is already pq safe) and simulating physics (also probably not something average joe wants to do every day).
In all likelihood, quantum computers will be specialized devices used, e.g., by scientists. You may be able to rent your quantum computing time if that gets cheap enough to be practical, but I doubt many people will ever own one.
You already can rent time on one - IBM and others offer it - but they are not cheap.
Maybe this will be used for video games at some point?
Saying that this will never happen feels a bit like what people were saying about computers when they were filling rooms and cost a fortune, and now everyone has a few of them and finds a lot of uses for them.
Not really, almost everything is faked and not really a physics sim. Imagine a world like GTA but every material has realistic deformation and destruction.
I’m not saying quantum computers would be able to do that, but it’s not like current video games are at a point where more compute wouldn’t improve them.
Personally for me this is the relevant part.
I can ofc imagine some niche games like Kerbal Space Program with complete realism, but I'm not convinced it makes it more enjoyable to play. Would be interesting to see for sure.
Apparently some people come here for serious discussion. It’s like an alternate universe.
Anyway, the article is about Microslop, a mostly-sw company taking about hw quantum computers. What serious discussion is there? Someone just wanted to sell their shares.
cough Microsoft, quantum cough That's not what I would call "serious discussion".
I think we will find quantum going mainstream in places we least expect, mostly based around derandomization and amplification of data throughput rather than any kind of compute.
Entanglement cannot be used to transmit messages, amplify bandwidth, or achieve "infinite compression" for a few foundational reasons:
1) The Classical Bottleneck: In quantum teleportation, you aren't actually moving information through space faster than light. To reconstruct the state of a teleported qubit at the destination, the sender must transmit two classical bits of data over a standard, traditional channel (limited by the speed of light, c).
2) The Randomness Vector: Without those two classical bits, the receiver's particle looks like completely randomized entropy (a maximally mixed state). You could spin your entangled particle right now, and the person on Mars would see their particle change state instantly—but to them, it just looks like a random coin toss. They cannot know what you chose to measure or what your result was until your classical radio signal arrives to break the encryption.
3) Holevo's Bound: From an information theory perspective, Holevo's theorem proves you cannot extract more than one bit of classical information from a single qubit. While superdense coding lets you pre-share entanglement to send two classical bits using one physical qubit, it still requires physically moving that qubit through space at or below the speed of light.
Whether you favor Copenhagen, Many-Worlds, or Pilot Wave theory, the physical reality across all interpretations remains identical: local causality is never violated. Entanglement shows us that nature is non-local, but it completely forbids us from weaponizing that non-locality to send a signal faster than c.
But that does clarify quite a few things thanks!
The 'C of quantum computers' as a concept doesn't really make sense, because the architecture of a quantum computer is fundamentally different to that of a classical one. I can go into more detail if anyone cares. Source: a masters in theoretical physics with a focus on quantum information processing.
Please, don't restrain yourself, tell us more.
AI.
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Leading with this dubious claim is fine comedy. Microsoft can barely build a useful conventional computer that runs its own platform and associated products. The Surface Book 3's being used at my job all launch Teams, Excel and Outlook like they're perpetually struggling to get out of bed. The Surface Pros have display issues minutes out of the box. This foolish Dash to Quantum will result in a lot of disappointment as unreliable rushed-to-market hardware is tauted by companies like Microsoft that are historically fond of doing just that.
And no, I don't think quantum computing is all hype. There is definitely meat on the bone, even if it only returns us to the somewhat annoying days of time sharing that most HN readers are probably too young to remember. But these idiots are fueling the hype train for the sake of quick-buck valuation, puffing for an audience that is increasingly tired of over-promising and under-delivering to the point where we will finally have an actual quantum computer and nobody will give a shit, especially after this whole AI circus has continued to prove itself an expensive pagent full of mummers and gimmicks.