The media claims less that a 100 qubits is really good for quantum computers:
Prototype quantum computers made of a few dozen qubits have materialized in the last couple of years, led by Google’s 54-qubit Sycamore machine.
IBM has built the largest quantum computer yet. Dubbed Osprey, it has 433 qubits, or quantum bits, which is more than triple the size of the company’s previously record-breaking 127-qubit computer and more than eight times larger than Google’s 53-qubit computer Sycamore.
Just as you know the media gets almost everything wrong about guns, they don’t know quantum computing either. This is what one company is saying publicly:
Photonic is producing 2cm square silicon chips capable of holding a million+ qubits.
I won’t tell you how long ago I knew this, what they are saying now, and what hints have been dropped about the future other than what I said yesterday. But the business model will be, basically, a “mainframe which you can rent time on.” The computer languages already exist to write quantum programs.
I recently asked another source with in depth knowledge of the state of the art in quantum computing, “I know about decryption, but what are going to be the other ‘killer apps’ for quantum computing?” The answer was, “Solutions to logistics problems, weather and climate modeling, and anything with really large numbers of variables.”
I’m more than a little sceptical about a marketing claim of millions of qubits when the state of the art is 400. And at 4K, when the state of the art requires mK or µK temperatures?
As for “anything with a large number of variables”, that sounds like nonsense. The special properties of quantum computing are not tied to large numbers of variables, and a lot of large variable algorithms have computational complexity in conventional machines that make them good fits to those machines. It is the problems that have exponential complexity in conventional machines but for which there are polynomial-cost quantum algorithms that are interesting in those machines.
Computer languages to write quantum algorithms? Where? I’ll admit my reading is limited, but “A gentle introduction to quantum computing” (which isn’t particularly gentle) doesn’t suggest any such thing. It requires graduate level physics even to get through that textbook.
I know there are various companies that offer ways to evaluate quantum algorithms on classic computers, but that is not terribly interesting and doesn’t of course get you any of the promised performance.
I’ll believe in the validity of quantum computing when this year’s Nobel prize for Physics is revoked. It’s almost all silliness on behalf of a ruling narrative (the Copenhagen interpretation), and I’m being gentle.
Quantum computing is analog computing. No more, no less. It can be done more easily and cheaply with hydraulics, gears, and a good random number generator – and has been done so in the past.
Quantum computing is classical analog computing? I don’t think so. Do you have a citation?
One would think that with all that computing power at their fingertips they could figure out gun-control is a loser idea?
And that the climate is going to change? Regardless. They going to give us a 6-month warning on tornados and hurricanes? Won’t change much.
I’m not the guy to complain about someone else’s toys. But like the giant super-collider, what is the end game. And real-life results?
For years I asked people what good we got out of NASA, almost to the man they said Velcro.
Useful stuff, but damn!
And in the meantime, we get morons like that Harari guy that thinks were all going to be super-human gods through some computer powered genetic remodel. Well, some of us. Not all, as like all things on this earth there ain’t enough to go around.
Super-computers are cool gidets. And I get it. But just look at what’s is being done with what we got already? Sure we want a bunch more?