I went out to my raised beds, which are thawing. I was pleased to see several wormholes in the loam!
They don't look like anything in the photos those "scientists" provided. I won't believe anything they said until they can produce pictures of the worms.
I look forward to the day when we can pay for the electricity used in the cryostats our quantum computers require, with the Crypto we will get access to by mining blockchain with them! It will lead us to an ouroboros of prosperity for humankind!
Night Watch is an utterly brilliant novel, in which Watch Commander Sam Vimes is forced back in time, where as an unknown with no power, he has to tutor his younger self in the shadow of an evil regime, all the while preventing the sociopathic Carcer from (a) killing him; (b) killing his younger self and (c) collapsing the time-line.
Our brains are really pretty good at classical physics, especially classical mechanics. When a rock falls off a cliff, we can work out where it's going to land. We can work out how to throw a stick so that the pointy end will land in a deer. We instinctively know if we can jump across that gap or not. Our brains are doing all the calculations and working that out.
But there's been no reason for our brains to evolve to understand quantum physics. Quantum physics effects are not relevant in the macroscopic world we live in, they only happen at microscopic dimensions. So it's all unintuitive for us. And we shouldn't underestimate the importance of intuition in understanding new things.
I haven't read that book, but I get how language is a barrier here. Even in learning about quantum physics, teachers tend to talk about waves and tiny cannonballs, trying to find example from the real world that we can intuitively understand. But that all breaks down at some point because, when we get down to it, there ARE no tiny cannonballs or even "waves" as we know them. It's all just an analogy, that we try to frame in a way that our brains can understand.
Thank you. I was skeptical as I ran across each of the claims you mention, but I knew my math and physics background wouldn't be enough to fully understand them.
I'm a little concerned that your article doesn't distinguish much between the science and the hype.
There's plenty of good science being done in quantum computing, and way too much hype. Scientists will continue to work away, exploring quantum computing, regardless of whether QC is actually amazing or just interesting.
I did warn everyone right at the start that I would concentrate on absurd claims :)
And let's face it, those came from several institutions and people who at least *claim* to be at the forefront. I'm just contextualising these, and saying what is *possible*, for those who might otherwise be taken in.
Read that paper by Hoefler et al. Sobering---at least, for me.
I did read the paper, and I discussed it with my colleagues. (I work in quantum computing, although more at the nuts-and-bolts end, than at the maths-and-programming end.) They all agree that the paper is pretty good.
This statement stuck out: "More generally, quantum computers will be practical for 'big compute' problems on small data, not big data problems." And I think this is part of why we're concentrating on integration of QC and HPC. Classical computing has scaled up immensely recently, and we're used to thinking in terms of having billions and trillions of transistors, and moving bits around at huge speeds, whereas in QC we're still working at the level of having one or two magic transistors.
Do you remember in "The Martian", where the speed of communication between NASA on Earth and Mark Watney on Mars was an issue? There were very bright minds at both ends, but they had to communicate across a link that had massive latencies and awful bandwidth. That's how I think of what we're trying to do with QC right now. We've got a huge amount of HPC capacity, which we can use to optimise what we're actually asking the qubits to do. We're doing all we can to minimise latency and maximise bandwidth.
We can't just upload gigabytes of data to the quantum computer, like we can with other accelerators. Instead we need to be very smart about distilling problems down to a number of very concise and pertinent 'questions' that we can have the QC work on.
It's spring.
I went out to my raised beds, which are thawing. I was pleased to see several wormholes in the loam!
They don't look like anything in the photos those "scientists" provided. I won't believe anything they said until they can produce pictures of the worms.
I look forward to the day when we can pay for the electricity used in the cryostats our quantum computers require, with the Crypto we will get access to by mining blockchain with them! It will lead us to an ouroboros of prosperity for humankind!
Great post! Would love to know the larger context of this quote:
‘It’s very hard to talk quantum using a language originally designed to tell other monkeys where the ripe fruit is.’ —Terry Pratchett, Night Watch
What is wrong with language here?
🙏🏼 thanks 🙏🏼
Night Watch is an utterly brilliant novel, in which Watch Commander Sam Vimes is forced back in time, where as an unknown with no power, he has to tutor his younger self in the shadow of an evil regime, all the while preventing the sociopathic Carcer from (a) killing him; (b) killing his younger self and (c) collapsing the time-line.
For more, you'll have to read the novel :)
Dr Jo.
Our brains are really pretty good at classical physics, especially classical mechanics. When a rock falls off a cliff, we can work out where it's going to land. We can work out how to throw a stick so that the pointy end will land in a deer. We instinctively know if we can jump across that gap or not. Our brains are doing all the calculations and working that out.
But there's been no reason for our brains to evolve to understand quantum physics. Quantum physics effects are not relevant in the macroscopic world we live in, they only happen at microscopic dimensions. So it's all unintuitive for us. And we shouldn't underestimate the importance of intuition in understanding new things.
I haven't read that book, but I get how language is a barrier here. Even in learning about quantum physics, teachers tend to talk about waves and tiny cannonballs, trying to find example from the real world that we can intuitively understand. But that all breaks down at some point because, when we get down to it, there ARE no tiny cannonballs or even "waves" as we know them. It's all just an analogy, that we try to frame in a way that our brains can understand.
Yeah, I got tricked with that quantum computing huge number of qubits -- until I was told the truth about how useful that huge number was.
Thank you. I was skeptical as I ran across each of the claims you mention, but I knew my math and physics background wouldn't be enough to fully understand them.
I'm a little concerned that your article doesn't distinguish much between the science and the hype.
There's plenty of good science being done in quantum computing, and way too much hype. Scientists will continue to work away, exploring quantum computing, regardless of whether QC is actually amazing or just interesting.
I did warn everyone right at the start that I would concentrate on absurd claims :)
And let's face it, those came from several institutions and people who at least *claim* to be at the forefront. I'm just contextualising these, and saying what is *possible*, for those who might otherwise be taken in.
Read that paper by Hoefler et al. Sobering---at least, for me.
I did read the paper, and I discussed it with my colleagues. (I work in quantum computing, although more at the nuts-and-bolts end, than at the maths-and-programming end.) They all agree that the paper is pretty good.
This statement stuck out: "More generally, quantum computers will be practical for 'big compute' problems on small data, not big data problems." And I think this is part of why we're concentrating on integration of QC and HPC. Classical computing has scaled up immensely recently, and we're used to thinking in terms of having billions and trillions of transistors, and moving bits around at huge speeds, whereas in QC we're still working at the level of having one or two magic transistors.
Do you remember in "The Martian", where the speed of communication between NASA on Earth and Mark Watney on Mars was an issue? There were very bright minds at both ends, but they had to communicate across a link that had massive latencies and awful bandwidth. That's how I think of what we're trying to do with QC right now. We've got a huge amount of HPC capacity, which we can use to optimise what we're actually asking the qubits to do. We're doing all we can to minimise latency and maximise bandwidth.
We can't just upload gigabytes of data to the quantum computer, like we can with other accelerators. Instead we need to be very smart about distilling problems down to a number of very concise and pertinent 'questions' that we can have the QC work on.
Fair enough.
I don't think anyone believe what D-Wave is saying any more. There's been a lot of boy-crying-wolf from them.