5 ms·

So there are huge algorithmic speedups just sitting there for the taking? And no one has used these? Color me skeptical.

by tormeh 11y ago

erikpukinskis 11y ago
No, they're saying it's not actually faster. The purpose of this research is to experiment with problems and push the hardware to discover limitations that can inform their design of the next generation of hardware. Quantum computing is a lot like fusion research. Nothing we know how to build will break even but we still need to build something so we can learn how to build something that could break even.
- fleitz 11y ago
  Why? We have plenty of better energy technologies than what we have, but we don't implement those, so why bother building an even better technology that we also likely won't build. It's like the dev team that won't refactor but thinks its new design will be perfect and also not need refactoring. The new project invariably needs refactoring which they don't do, leading to another ground up rewrite. I'm pretty sure by the year 2200, we'll have a coffee cup sized zero point energy device but still get our power from coal.
  - Lazare 11y ago
    > We have plenty of better energy technologies than what we have, but we don't implement those, Well, why don't you do it then? The potential profits are absurd; don't you want to be the world's first trillionaire? > I'm pretty sure by the year 2200, we'll have a coffee cup sized zero point energy device but still get our power from coal. You're suggesting that people will choose to consume expense goods and services over otherwise identical cheaper goods and services? This does not seem to mesh well with observed human behaviour.
    - pfisch 11y ago
      I mean I don't really agree with fleitz necessarily, but any power source can be very cheap/free at the consumer/market level when the government is subsidizing all the costs. The government is not really a rational actor in economic markets and is often guided by other factors like popular vote, corruption, etc. It is hard to explain why we don't use more nuclear power from an economic standpoint, but it is easy to understand how politicians and lobbyists have capitalized on fear mongering to create our current energy markets.
      - nl 11y ago
        It is hard to explain why we don't use more nuclear power from an economic standpoint It's very easy to explain why we don't use more nuclear power from an economic standpoint. See, for example: Government subsidies to the nuclear power industry over the past fifty years have been so large in proportion to the value of the energy produced that in some cases it would have cost taxpayers less to simply buy kilowatts on the open market and give them away, according to a February 2011 report by the Union of Concerned Scientists. http://www.ucsusa.org/nuclear-power/cost-nuclear-power/nuclear-power-subsidies-report http://www.ucsusa.org/nuclear-power/cost-nuclear-power/nucle... It's something of an anti-pattern on HN to think that nuclear power is somehow this secret source of cheap energy and it is only those damn anti-science greens who conspire to give it a bad name. It's not. Nuclear power is expensive. Some will blame unfair (?) government regulation for that. It is true that regulation adds to the costs, but regulation seems reasonable given the fairly large costs associated with accidents. Some will claim that the dangers associated with Nuclear power are overstated, and that coal kills more people. I agree that coal should be replaced, but not with nuclear. Some will claim that only nuclear power can provide base-load capability without greenhouse gases. I disagree, and point to the range of energy storage capabilities available now, the rapidly dropping costs of batteries, and the increasing decentralization of the power grid.
        fleitz 11y ago
        85% of my energy is renewable and has been in my area since the 60s, there's no nuclear involved at all.
  - johncolanduoni 11y ago
    The difference is that even if we had the entire world put all production efforts towards building a quantum computer, we don't know what to build. It's not a matter of cost or resources; it's a matter of not even knowing exactly what to construct.
SideburnsOfDoom 11y ago
If I understand "annealing" techniques (1) correctly, they are fast as they combine randomness with hill climbing. So they are not exhaustive, and thus not guaranteed to find the globally best answer. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulated_annealing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulated_annealing
- joakleaf 11y ago
  Correct, although it is argued, that given "enough" time Simulated Annealing will have search the entire solution space and thus return the global optimum. Simulated Annealing is a great tool for optimization problems, because it is almost trivial to implement -- If you have a combinatorial problem, that you evaluate the objective function on (preferable evaluate changes easily), then SA is a good starting point. It is a meta-heuristic that can be applied to almost any problem. However, Simulated Annealing is almost never the best way. Better methods (more efficient/better results) are often either based on complex meta heuristics or custom heuristics for approximate results, or branch and bound or dynamic programming for guaranteed optimum. If quantum computing enables us to perform a massive speed-up with a simple SA-like meta-heuristic, then that would make "solving" NP-hard problems a much more common task. You could just insert your problem into this "black box", and a few seconds later you'll get the result.

So there are huge algorithmic speedups just sitting there for the taking? And no one has used these? Color me skeptical.

by tormeh 11y ago

So there are huge algorithmic speedups just sitting there for the taking? And no one has used these? Color me skeptical.

erikpukinskis 11y ago

No, they're saying it's not actually faster. The purpose of this research is to experiment with problems and push the hardware to discover limitations that can inform their design of the next generation of hardware. Quantum computing is a lot like fusion research. Nothing we know how to build will break even but we still need to build something so we can learn how to build something that could break even.

fleitz 11y ago
Why? We have plenty of better energy technologies than what we have, but we don't implement those, so why bother building an even better technology that we also likely won't build. It's like the dev team that won't refactor but thinks its new design will be perfect and also not need refactoring. The new project invariably needs refactoring which they don't do, leading to another ground up rewrite. I'm pretty sure by the year 2200, we'll have a coffee cup sized zero point energy device but still get our power from coal.
- Lazare 11y ago
  > We have plenty of better energy technologies than what we have, but we don't implement those, Well, why don't you do it then? The potential profits are absurd; don't you want to be the world's first trillionaire? > I'm pretty sure by the year 2200, we'll have a coffee cup sized zero point energy device but still get our power from coal. You're suggesting that people will choose to consume expense goods and services over otherwise identical cheaper goods and services? This does not seem to mesh well with observed human behaviour.
  - pfisch 11y ago
    I mean I don't really agree with fleitz necessarily, but any power source can be very cheap/free at the consumer/market level when the government is subsidizing all the costs. The government is not really a rational actor in economic markets and is often guided by other factors like popular vote, corruption, etc. It is hard to explain why we don't use more nuclear power from an economic standpoint, but it is easy to understand how politicians and lobbyists have capitalized on fear mongering to create our current energy markets.
    - nl 11y ago
      It is hard to explain why we don't use more nuclear power from an economic standpoint It's very easy to explain why we don't use more nuclear power from an economic standpoint. See, for example: Government subsidies to the nuclear power industry over the past fifty years have been so large in proportion to the value of the energy produced that in some cases it would have cost taxpayers less to simply buy kilowatts on the open market and give them away, according to a February 2011 report by the Union of Concerned Scientists. http://www.ucsusa.org/nuclear-power/cost-nuclear-power/nuclear-power-subsidies-report http://www.ucsusa.org/nuclear-power/cost-nuclear-power/nucle... It's something of an anti-pattern on HN to think that nuclear power is somehow this secret source of cheap energy and it is only those damn anti-science greens who conspire to give it a bad name. It's not. Nuclear power is expensive. Some will blame unfair (?) government regulation for that. It is true that regulation adds to the costs, but regulation seems reasonable given the fairly large costs associated with accidents. Some will claim that the dangers associated with Nuclear power are overstated, and that coal kills more people. I agree that coal should be replaced, but not with nuclear. Some will claim that only nuclear power can provide base-load capability without greenhouse gases. I disagree, and point to the range of energy storage capabilities available now, the rapidly dropping costs of batteries, and the increasing decentralization of the power grid.
      - fleitz 11y ago
        85% of my energy is renewable and has been in my area since the 60s, there's no nuclear involved at all.
- johncolanduoni 11y ago
  The difference is that even if we had the entire world put all production efforts towards building a quantum computer, we don't know what to build. It's not a matter of cost or resources; it's a matter of not even knowing exactly what to construct.

SideburnsOfDoom 11y ago

If I understand "annealing" techniques (1) correctly, they are fast as they combine randomness with hill climbing. So they are not exhaustive, and thus not guaranteed to find the globally best answer. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulated_annealing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulated_annealing

joakleaf 11y ago
Correct, although it is argued, that given "enough" time Simulated Annealing will have search the entire solution space and thus return the global optimum. Simulated Annealing is a great tool for optimization problems, because it is almost trivial to implement -- If you have a combinatorial problem, that you evaluate the objective function on (preferable evaluate changes easily), then SA is a good starting point. It is a meta-heuristic that can be applied to almost any problem. However, Simulated Annealing is almost never the best way. Better methods (more efficient/better results) are often either based on complex meta heuristics or custom heuristics for approximate results, or branch and bound or dynamic programming for guaranteed optimum. If quantum computing enables us to perform a massive speed-up with a simple SA-like meta-heuristic, then that would make "solving" NP-hard problems a much more common task. You could just insert your problem into this "black box", and a few seconds later you'll get the result.