Breakthrough Paves Way for Affordable Quantum Computers | Hacker News Reader

Breakthrough Paves Way for Affordable Quantum Computers

cemag.us

10 pointslisper9 comments

> "We demonstrated that a highly coherent qubit, like the spin of a single phosphorus atom in isotopically enriched silicon, can be controlled using electric fields, instead of using pulses of oscillating magnetic fields"

Isn't getting a qubit into a coherent state in the first place one of the biggest hurdles in quantum computing? The headline seems to be putting the cart before the horse saying we'll get "affordable" quantum computers thanks to this.

I'm not knocking the scientists efforts, I don't doubt the worth of their discovery, but if science news articles were true we'd have flying solar powered cars with batteries the size of a cell phone that can recharge in under a minute.

Putting a qubit in a coherent state really isn't a technical challenge anymore. The challenge these days is getting it to stay in a coherent state (ie. avoid decoherence) long enough to be able to perform gates on the qubit and perform computations. I'm about half way through the paper so far and I really think it is quite an interesting approach and result.

Jesus, please don't upvote this clickbait headline. It's literally lying to get attention.

We don't have any quantum computers yet. We will probably have unaffordable quantum computers before we'll have affordable quantum computers. This headline is not even a believable lie.

Just because the headline is lying doesn't mean the article doesn't contain useful and interesting information. The popular press exaggerates headlines all the time to get attention, and HN guidelines mandate submitting with the original headline.

I disagree. Bytes from a source who is demonstrated to be willing to lie to you for ratings isn't information, it's just noise, which is not useful. I can't objectively say it's not interesting, but I can say is that I'm not interested.

Actually, it turns out that the headline is taken directly from the UNSW press release:

http://newsroom.unsw.edu.au/news/science-tech/breakthrough-o...

So it's not CE magazine that's lying (if they're lying), it's the University of New South Wales. And if you're going to accuse UNSW of lying you need a stronger argument.

UNSW is lying in their headline to attract attention to their research.

We aren't close to affordable quantum computing because we don't have quantum computing at any price point, let alone at an affordable one. Even a single multibillion dollar quantum computer would have huge implications, most notably that RSA, the basis for most of modern security, would be broken.

This is like claiming we're close to affordable human Mars travel. We haven't even put one human on Mars; it would be ridiculous to claim we are close to making it affordable.

I am involved in the field, and I can say that it is quite an interesting result. Of course it doesn't mean we will have affordable quantum computer soon, or even in the near future but it is a legitimate result.

And you trust someone who thinks that it means we will have an affordable quantum computer soon to report it?

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