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If this is accurate, it is a poor naming convention. This is the exact opposite of the way these concepts should be labeled to make intuitive sense.
by excalibur 7y ago
If this is accurate, it is a poor naming convention. This is the exact opposite of the way these concepts should be labeled to make intuitive sense.
- reikonomusha 7y ago“Quantum supremacy” has been a long-standing term invented by the quantum information science research community for the QIS community many years ago. It wasn’t made recently and settled being “the” term to mean a specific mathematical/empirical result.
- lallysingh 7y agoYou have to make your grant proposals sexy.
- marcosdumay 7y agoWhat term fits better the mark where quantum computers become better than classical computers at something?
- excalibur 7y agoQuantum advantage may not be the perfect term, but it seems to be a better fit than quantum supremacy. The former term conveys a sense that it has a limited scope, while the latter seems to imply that it beats classical across the board, or in the majority of cases, or even just in the ones we care about. I get that the term quantum supremacy was coined long ago, by people who were most likely not looking at the event with the degree of granularity that our present technologies require. It's just unfortunate that what made sense on a macro level becomes illogical when looking at the minutiae. Although I suppose this IS fitting in a way, since it parallels quantum mechanics itself.
- marcosdumay 7y agoFrom now on, quantum computers will beat classical computers, one problem at a time, until they are the only viable option for all the quantum easy problems (no we don't know exactly what those are). Supremacy seems quite fitting.
- excalibur 7y agoI think you overestimate the accomplishment at hand.
- marcosdumay 7y agoYou are only looking at one accomplishment, when the name is meant to apply to an entire period.
- UncleMeat 7y agoSo? A huge number of scientific ideas are badly named for laypeople. We have both "somewhat homomorphic encryption" and "partially homomorphic encryption" and they mean different things. That's done bad jargon. But when targeting the research community it works fine. There are no naming committees. Names pop up largely by accident. This is true for all fields. Heck the entire field "artificial intelligence" is named in a way that causes no end of incorrect beliefs among laypeople. The solution is better journalism, not fighting over how names are understood outside the community.