4 ms·

I don't know what exactly your belief is rooted on (clearly not physics), but of course you're free to put your money wherever you want, just be aware that: -

by tagrun 7y ago

I don't know what exactly your belief is rooted on (clearly not physics), but of course you're free to put your money wherever you want, just be aware that: - Qubits are not boolean. Classical error correction does not work in quantum computers. You need quantum error correction. - The exponential improvements are in single qubit coherence times, and a stagnation in those improvements doesn't prevent an increase in the number of qubits. (it'd be nice to have, though, because then eventually we wouldn't even need error correction) - No, it doesn't take 1000 or even 100 physical qubits to have a high fidelity qubit (it can actually be 1:1 with dynamical error correction) or 20000 error corrected qubits to tackle real world problems (Shor's algorithm isn't the only interesting thing out there, simulating some quantum systems requires far less qubits and probably more interesting for people in natural sciences) - Even if we were 3-5 orders of magnitudes away in # of qubits, it's still a matter of time, and there is still nothing fundamental in physics or material science that prevents having millions of physical qubits. - Now I feel like I'm dealing with one of those non-physicists people again who claim quantum computers are a pipe dream, only this time instead of a faulty physical argument, it has no real technical basis at all, so this is where I'd like to stop. Enjoy the rest of your day

mlyle 7y ago
> - Qubits are not boolean. Classical error correction does not work in quantum computers. You need quantum error correction. Yah, no shit sherlock. I'm sorry you didn't like my handwavy sentence and a half phrasing of my post, but your tone is just not necessary. > - No, it doesn't take 1000 or even 100 physical qubits to have a high fidelity qubit (it can actually be 1:1 with dynamical error correction) or 20000 error corrected qubits to tackle real world problems (Shor's algorithm isn't the only interesting thing out there, simulating some quantum systems requires far less qubits and probably more interesting for people in natural sciences) Shor's algorithm is a really important milestone. Lots of interesting problems are harder than factoring. We think we need ~2000 logical qubits to get to the most basic interesting cases of Shor's, and with some multiple for error correction we have 3 OOM right there. > Even if we were 3-5 orders of magnitudes away in # of qubits, it's still a matter of time, and there is still nothing fundamental in physics or material science that prevents having millions of physical qubits. There probably isn't. But there may be in economics or systems complexity. > - Now I feel like I'm dealing with one of those non-physicists people again who claim quantum computers are a pipe dream, only this time instead of a faulty physical argument, it has no real technical basis at all, so this is where I'd like to stop. Enjoy the rest of your day Yah, assuming that we can extrapolate maintain the current rate of progress for an 5 OOM improvement is reasonable. Just one question: how many orders of magnitude of improvement will we gain at the current rate? Can we get 5? 20? 100? Obviously we start running into things like the mass of the planet, but perhaps there's some limiting factors before then? :P It's really hard to pin down where they are ahead of time. If we double qubits and coherence annually, 5 OOM is 40+ years. How many years will this doubling continue at an annual pace? How long until we're all just enslaved to make qubits? ;)

by tagrun 7y ago

mlyle 7y ago

> - Qubits are not boolean. Classical error correction does not work in quantum computers. You need quantum error correction. Yah, no shit sherlock. I'm sorry you didn't like my handwavy sentence and a half phrasing of my post, but your tone is just not necessary. > - No, it doesn't take 1000 or even 100 physical qubits to have a high fidelity qubit (it can actually be 1:1 with dynamical error correction) or 20000 error corrected qubits to tackle real world problems (Shor's algorithm isn't the only interesting thing out there, simulating some quantum systems requires far less qubits and probably more interesting for people in natural sciences) Shor's algorithm is a really important milestone. Lots of interesting problems are harder than factoring. We think we need ~2000 logical qubits to get to the most basic interesting cases of Shor's, and with some multiple for error correction we have 3 OOM right there. > Even if we were 3-5 orders of magnitudes away in # of qubits, it's still a matter of time, and there is still nothing fundamental in physics or material science that prevents having millions of physical qubits. There probably isn't. But there may be in economics or systems complexity. > - Now I feel like I'm dealing with one of those non-physicists people again who claim quantum computers are a pipe dream, only this time instead of a faulty physical argument, it has no real technical basis at all, so this is where I'd like to stop. Enjoy the rest of your day Yah, assuming that we can extrapolate maintain the current rate of progress for an 5 OOM improvement is reasonable. Just one question: how many orders of magnitude of improvement will we gain at the current rate? Can we get 5? 20? 100? Obviously we start running into things like the mass of the planet, but perhaps there's some limiting factors before then? :P It's really hard to pin down where they are ahead of time. If we double qubits and coherence annually, 5 OOM is 40+ years. How many years will this doubling continue at an annual pace? How long until we're all just enslaved to make qubits? ;)