11 ms·

Quantum supremacy, now with BosonSampling

223 points by apsec112 6y ago

haecceity 6y ago
Mathematician cares about experimental physics because it settles his dispute and satiates his ego.
sanxiyn 6y ago
A great achievement, probably done with much less budget than Google's Sycamore.
- fsh 6y ago
  I wouldn't be so sure. Jian-Wei Pan is known for having a pretty much unlimited budget. They launched a freaking satellite!
  - gpm 6y ago
    And they burnt $400,000 answering a referees comment instead of just saying "because money".
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
Areading314 6y ago
Why are we claiming this was achieved by "China" rather than the responsible scientists? Science is a global cooperative effort, rather than a national competition. Also, link to the actual article: https://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2020/12/02/science.abe8770 https://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2020/12/02/scie...
- thefounder 6y ago
  >> Why are we claiming this was achieved by "China" rather than the responsible scientists? Because China(chinese people) funded the science? It may also hint that the governance system is productive.
- cambalache 6y ago
  The same way we claim "the USSR" launched Sputnik, and "America" put a man on the moon.
- machinelabo 6y ago
  Just today, US/UK had a small exchange over who is best at vaccine approval process: https://www.nytimes.com/live/2020/12/03/world/covid-19-coronavirus/as-the-uk-claims-bragging-rights-for-the-best-vaccine-regulators-yes-really-us-officials-beg-to-differ https://www.nytimes.com/live/2020/12/03/world/covid-19-coron... Any time, any one who brings up their nation as being the best - I've got no room for you in my life. I despise nationalism and national pride in all forms. It only breeds hatred and unproductive relationships, and creates echo chambers. This goes for all countries. We're tiny blobs of muttering meat in the universe. Temporarily here.
  - arvinsim 6y ago
    It's natural human instinct to seek tribes.
    - Quekid5 6y ago
      True, but that doesn't mean that it's a good thing or that it shouldn't be resisted.
      - zpeti 6y ago
        To just throw out the evolutionary workings of not only humans, but many of our animal ancestors is extremely naive. You are suggesting you know better than a system that millions of years of evolution have created. You are also assuming that you know all the risks of NOT organising in tribes, that somehow if all humans were some untribal lonely individual entities, the world would work better. Many many billions of people and animals seem to disagree.
        sgift 6y ago
        We know better than evolution all the time. Else: No medicine, no operations, no science (random list of things, more can be added). Doesn't sound like a very good world to me.
        6y ago
- pmoriarty 6y ago
  That's funny. Somehow I've never in my life heard this objection regarding American research.
  - adventured 6y ago
    Objection is common when the US is used to represent its accomplishments. The objectors usually counter that it's a win for humanity, as a way to debase something positive for the US. Happens in every major thread on HN that involves the US doing something great. See: every significant accomplishment by SpaceX or NASA for a repeating case. If you really want to see objectors get triggered, check out the past threads that tangent off about SpaceX employees chanting USA USA USA on video, that's always quite amusing.
- thraway12 6y ago
  Because China achieves a comparative security advantage?
- stonogo 6y ago
  A Chinese citizen, who happens to be the Vice Chair of a Chinese political party, working for the University of Science and Technology of China, using money entirely from the Chinese government, led a team consisting entirely of other Chinese citizens working for Chinese institutions, and you're wondering why we're claiming this was achieved by "China"? Science might be a global cooperative effort, but this paper comes from China.
  - xenihn 6y ago
    It feels like anyone who is getting heated over this link and the subsequent discussion didn't even read Scott's post to begin with.
  - throwaway4good 6y ago
    One of the things that is interesting about the Chinese political system is the large number of engineers and scientists who also have high political positions. Maybe it is a sign of a society still focused on building stuff rather than redistributing and administrating what is already there.
    - lucian1900 6y ago
      There’s also a tendency for scientists to be Marxists, since dialectical materialism is the philosophy of all science in general.
- ngokevin 6y ago
  I guess "China" triggers Americans with negative sentiments with as the media always does with us v. them cold war mentality, which gets more clicks. May I ask what alternative title do you suggest, to name the individuals?
  - remarkEon 6y ago
    There’s probably a lot of countries that “trigger” Americans with “negative sentiments”. Some justified, some not. Regardless of the justification, keeping track of the scientific progress of a country that has explicitly set out to usurp the US is useful.
    - porpoise 6y ago
      "a country that has explicitly set out to usurp the US is useful" Can you provide some evidence for saying that China "explicitly" set out to do this? The Chinese government has been consistently "explicit" that it does not aim to replace or supplant the US [1][2][3]. Perhaps you mean "actions speak louder than words" and that this intention is evident from the actions they've undertaken, in which case it would be nice to know what actions you have in mind, as well as how you ruled out boring explanations of those actions that China's leaders would have given themselves. [1] https://amp.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy/article/3030717/china-doesnt-want-supplant-us-it-will-keep-growing-beijing https://amp.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy/article/3030717/ch... [2] https://apnews.com/article/1c5193f5eb936b99b740b758da8efad3 https://apnews.com/article/1c5193f5eb936b99b740b758da8efad3 [3] https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.wionews.com/world/not-trying-to-replace-us-as-worlds-top-technological-power-says-china-314222/amp https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.wionews.com/world/not-tryin...
      - remarkEon 6y ago
        >China says >China says >China says Yeah, so, you can actually read the internal leaks from Xi’s speeches and not post planted CCP propaganda. Thanks. Here’s just a sample. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Document_Number_Nine https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Document_Number_Nine Question: is Taiwan its own sovereign state? Certainly feels that way every time I’m there for work.
- Melting_Harps 6y ago
  > Science is a global cooperative effort, rather than a national competition. Haha... that's not at all the case; academics are petty people with fragile egos who are often under the thumb of lab directors with even worse egos and often come into that role with an ax to grind. Racism, be it veiled or otherwise, is also no stranger to the realms of Science. Much less the dregs called the peer-reviewed system. Consider the plight of Dr. He Jiankui who many researchers in the West lauded in private, but scorned in public when the 'evil Chinese Scientist' revealed his results to the Public because grant money and political standing were at risk. Collaborations are limited in so far as their personal utility for more grants or prestige, lets not elevate researchers and their horrible practices to places they do not belong. I think you would find the process entirely sad and depressing, as most of us did in our undergrad, when you see it for what it really is.
  - luc4sdreyer 6y ago
    >who many researchers in the West lauded in private I've only heard universal condemnation from scientists, where can I learn more about this private support for him? Or am I going to take your word for it?
    - Melting_Harps 6y ago
      > Or am I going to take your word for it? Not necessary, but I'm just going to assume you aren't a biologist nor do you follow the Bio-hacker culture, right? Start with Josiah Zayner's talks from the time of that event. I think it was in the conference ahead of the trailer release of 'Code of the Wild' that stands out. But he's on record talking about it as well, I think Dr. Church also touched on it as well. The Bio Hack the Planet conference talks might also have more details, as I recall him talking about the events leading up to Dr. Doudna's misplaced/misunderstood role in CRISPR that eventually got her a Nobel Prize and it segued into that discussion, too. Back on PC Edit: This piece [0] is also worth a read, here is an excerpt from Science: > Yet opposition was not unanimous. A few months before He met the couples, a committee convened by the U.S. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) concluded in a well-publicized report that human trials of germline editing "might be permitted" if strict criteria were met. The group of scientists, lawyers, bioethicists, and patient advocates spelled out a regulatory framework but cautioned that "these criteria are necessarily vague" because various societies, caregivers, and patients would view them differently. The committee notably did not call for an international ban, arguing instead for governmental regulation as each country deemed appropriate and "voluntary self-regulation pursuant to professional guidelines." >> That circle included leading scientists—among them a Nobel laureate—in China and the United States, business executives, an entrepreneur connected to venture capitalists, authors of the NASEM report, a controversial U.S. IVF specialist who discussed opening a gene-editing clinic with He, and at least one Chinese politician. "He had an awful lot of company to be called a ‘rogue,’" says geneticist George Church, a CRISPR pioneer at Harvard University who was not in the circle of trust and is one of the few scientists to defend at least some aspects of He's experiment. The questionable stance, and reluctance comes when academic researchers know that their grants and good standing with a chosen University (and the prestige and clout they garner) comes under threat. Maybe its because I've seen this kind of thing play out in real time when I was in School and then entered the Industry that I'm not all surprised by it... but it's also a sense of remorse mixed with dread and despair as a person who was on track to be a lab Clinical Lab Scientist but what disgusted at what 'really happens' internally that shaped my view(s) and made me leave the Industry entirely. 0: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/08/untold-story-circle-trust-behind-world-s-first-gene-edited-babies https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/08/untold-story-circle-...
- wly_cdgr 6y ago
  Crazy as it may seem, it's because it was done by Chinese scientists working and living in China
- telaelit 6y ago
  The US always has to propagandize news from China since they are an economic rival. Did they run the headline “America achieves quantum supremacy” when Google supposedly achieved quantum supremacy? Nope.
- knolax 6y ago
  And yet nobody ever brings up this objection when it's negative press.
- rkangel 6y ago
  For roughly the same reason that the first example of quantum supremacy we attribute to Google rather than individual scientists. I actually know the names of the Chinese responsible, I couldn't tell you the names of anyone on the Google team. I also wonder how the Google result was reported in China. I wouldn't be surprised if it was reported as "Americans have done X".
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
cambalache 6y ago
> When I refereed the Science paper, I asked why the authors directly verified the results of their experiment only for up to 26-30 photons, relying on plausible extrapolations beyond that. While directly verifying the results of n-photon BosonSampling takes ~2n time for any known classical algorithm, I said, surely it should be possible with existing computers to go up to n=40 or n=50? A couple weeks later, the authors responded, saying that they’d now verified their results up to n=40, but it burned $400,000 worth of supercomputer time so they decided to stop there. This was by far the most expensive referee report I ever wrote! They should have requested AWS free credits :)
blackrock 6y ago
Fascinating. It seems the Chinese scientists achieved this Quantum Supremacy at normal room temperatures, and using standard industrial components used elsewhere in commercial telecom equipment. At first, I thought this was more of a type of single-use quantum circuit, where you can only use it to solve this one problem. And you'd have to build a new rig to solve another function. And on and on, until you sorta get a general purpose super quantum computer, with all these individual rigs solving different functions, that can finally do useful work. Whereas the Google Sycamore is more of a general purpose quantum computer that can be reprogrammed to solve anything. But, this guy believes that this might be a first step to a universal photonic quantum computer. The last part was incredible. They verified the results on a supercomputer, and went up to n=40. But the supercomputer time costed them $400,000. So they decided to stop there. Public Key Crypto Code breaking, here we come. Setec Astronomy [1] [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GutJf9umD9c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GutJf9umD9c
- api 6y ago
  Most cryptographers think we will see RSA and EC type public key code breaking at least for small keys (<=1024 for RSA, <256 for EC) within 10-15 years. Once that happens we can more or less consider classical asymmetric crypto unsafe since we can assume deep-pocketed adversaries (NSA, FSB, China, etc.) may be ahead of what is publicly disclosed. That's why classically computable but quantum resistant asymmetric cryptography is one of the hottest areas of crypto research right now.
  - benlivengood 6y ago
    Does anyone really think the deep pockets of the TLAs haven't already done at least this well, especially with photonics at least? All the theoretical fundamentals have been known for decades. If COTS parts can do this then a focused research program begun decades ago will have already achieved what is public today. Public demonstration to me is just a proof-of-concept validating that state actors achieved parity with it quite a while ago.
    - api 6y ago
est 6y ago
> Also: when Covid first started, and facemasks were plentiful in China but almost impossible to get in the US, Chaoyang Lu, one of the authors of the new work and my sometime correspondent on the theory of BosonSampling, decided to mail me a box of 200 masks (I didn’t ask for it). I don’t think that influenced my later review, but was appreciated nonetheless. Ha
- ceilingcorner 6y ago
  > facemasks were plentiful in China but almost impossible to get in the US That wasn't a coincidence. > Just after the lockdown of Wuhan in January, the same week the U.S. confirmed its first case of the novel coronavirus, Chinese civic organizations in dozens of countries on five continents began buying masks and other personal protective equipment. > In Nagoya, Japan, volunteers drove to pharmacies and bought 520,000 masks in three days, according to an account carried by Xinhua, China’s official news agency. By Jan. 26, the head of a Chinese chamber of commerce in Toronto, just back from a trip to Beijing, started making calls to members telling them they needed to join the effort, the report said. Almost 100 people drove to Toronto—some overnight, on icy roads—and were dispatched to buy supplies. Planes out of Kenya and Milan were packed with boxes and suitcases filled with PPE bound for China. An overseas Chinese association in Argentina sent some 25,000 masks within a week of receiving the request. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-09-17/behind-china-s-epic-dash-for-ppe-that-left-the-world-short-on-masks https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-09-17/behind-ch...
  - reaperducer 6y ago
    In Nagoya, Japan, volunteers drove to pharmacies and bought 520,000 masks in three days, Seems like it was a global phenomenon. There were articles in the local newspapers where I live (US) interviewing Chinese expats who were buying all the PPE they could find and shipping them home. While it put other countries in a bad position, I think it was probably a perfectly normal thing for an expat to do since people didn't know how bad it would get outside of China at the time. Most times there is a disaster somewhere in the world, the people from that country who live elsewhere try to help.
im3w1l 6y ago
What I like about quantum supremacy is that it finally lays to rest the layman theory that the world is a simulation, and that quantum effects are because of shortcuts and corner cutting. No! Our world is harder to simulate than a classical one, which can only have classical computers.
- andrewflnr 6y ago
  Why do you think the simulators, if there be such, are limited to classical computers? Why do you think they have limits of any kind? It is impossible in principle to have any evidence about simulationism. All knowledge about everything from logic up is from inside the simulation. Just accept that it's an epistemological tarpit and give up.
  - im3w1l 6y ago
    I don't mean dismiss simulation, but I see now how it could be read that way. The key is the second part of the and-clause: quantum stuff being a side effect of a lazy simulator. That's what doesn't hold water.
    - asimovfan 6y ago
      there was a layman assumption like that?
      - hoseja 6y ago
        I've seen it.
    - andrewflnr 6y ago
      I mean to dismiss simulation, so I wouldn't be offended if you did.
  - api 6y ago
    This form of world-as-simulation is effectively identical to strong theism. The world exists in the mind of God or runs on some supernatural "hardware" is basically the same thing as saying the world is a beyond-classical simulation.
contemporary343 6y ago
One of the lead authors posted some photos of the setup on twitter: https://twitter.com/chaoyanglu/status/1334684227342725120 https://twitter.com/chaoyanglu/status/1334684227342725120 Quite incredible! And for anyone who's worked in optics or photonics, a real experimental feat. (just look at that table!)
- fsh 6y ago
  Beautiful setup! On the flip side this looks extremely hard to scale. I wonder how many students were required just to align this thing.
  - throwaway4good 6y ago
    Funny. To me this looks like something that can be turned into a commercial product.
    - throwaway4good 6y ago
      Obviously it won't go into your phone any time soon but as a specialised piece of hardware sold for +100k usd to universities and companies who can actually use it.
      - mpfundstein 6y ago
        and thats a market
        throwaway4good 6y ago
        it is
    - fsh 6y ago
      Anything can be turned into a product. The appeal of chip-based technologies such as superconducting qbits or integrated photonics is that one could at least in theory scale them to orders of magnitude larger sizes. This is simply not possible with macroscopic mirrors and beam splitters on steel posts.
ochronus 6y ago
Title sounds like the next Civ game ;)
prower 6y ago
Sorry for the off-topic, but I can't help thinking about the title of the news as something straight out of Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri :)
- iExploder 6y ago
  It is every citizen's final duty to go into the tanks, and become one with all the people. — Chairman Sheng-ji Yang, "Ethics for Tomorrow"
  - uCantCauseUCant 6y ago
    Its every chairmans final duty to grow into the chair, and become a mummy on the throne.
diskmuncher 6y ago
The more interesting question may be what innovation was achieved in performing the experiment, mainly I assume, in controlling and measuring the large number of photons accurately. Hints on those seem to be Fig. 2 [1]. In the spirit of sensationalizing "China" and "supremacy", does anyone know if this technology is relevant to some Star Wars weaponry for example? [1] https://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2020/12/02/science.abe8770/tab-figures-data https://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2020/12/02/scie...
- rsln-s 6y ago
  It's not control of individuals photons (that would be boson sampling), but gaussian pulses. Still a tour-de-force of a demonstration, but actual practical implications are very limited.
ngcc_hk 6y ago
Look at the Q&a what is the significance ... other than the communist did it 1 year after google ?
emerged 6y ago
That’s very cool, although I’d imagine that several nations have much stronger quantum tech than what is made public. Hasn’t it always been that way?
pera 6y ago
I feel a bit embarrassed for asking, but can someone explain in layman's terms why the Gaussian boson sampling experiment proves quantum supremacy? I believe my main confusion is why is this experiment being called a computation: to me this seems to be simply the observation of some physical phenomena which happens to be very hard to calculate with a classical computer.
- monboddo 6y ago
  I think here computation does not mean general programmability, rather just a single narrow problem. A classical computer running a predefined program would be hard to calculate on pen and paper, so there is silicon supremacy. Here finding the probability distribution of the outputs is hard classically, hence quantum supremacy.
- carapace 6y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analog_computer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analog_computer > An analog computer or analogue computer is a type of computer that uses the continuously changeable aspects of physical phenomena such as electrical, mechanical, or hydraulic quantities to model the problem being solved. In contrast, digital computers represent varying quantities symbolically and by discrete values of both time and amplitude.
  - Koshkin 6y ago
    Isn't a quantum computer digital? ("Quantum" and "continuously changeable" sound opposite to each other.)
  - pera 6y ago
    Yes but I don't understand how this can be seen as modelling anything but the experiment one is performing: the way I interpret this proof of quantum supremacy is (and again I know this is incorrect but don't know why) almost like selecting any physical phenomena to which a simulation of it is computationally hard, and then say that the result of this experiment is the returned value of a "computation". I feel it's almost like claiming you are going to simulate fluid dynamics with an actual water tank, some dye, and a camera.
dajomu 6y ago
So am I right in thinking that this is a major step towards quantum computing? This looks like the kind of thing that could be scaled and productionised relatively easily compared to other approaches?
littlestymaar 6y ago
I's really a bigger feat than what google achieved last year[1] and yet almost nobody will hear about it because google took all the hype. It's a pretty sad story actually. [1]: the google achievement was designing a specific problem for which their quantum computer could perform better than classical computers. Now, this is a solution to a preexisting problem. Not to say that Google's result wasn't important, but this one is “one rank” higher.
- Aardwolf 6y ago
  We hear about it here now, and it's a more recent achievement so of course it's bigger, it wouldn't be an achievement if it was smaller than the state of the art of a year ago
  - littlestymaar 6y ago
    It's not just bigger, it's an order of magnitude bigger. Actually, some people weren't totally convinced that Google's result really deserved the “quantum supremacy” label. Sure, the guys at IBM[1] were a bit bitter, but their argument make sense (and they weren't alone on that). This result unambiguously deserve such qualification: this the kind of results everybody expected to be called “Quantum supremacy”, so that's a bit sad that they won't get as much credit as google's team. [1]: https://www.ibm.com/blogs/research/2019/10/on-quantum-supremacy/ https://www.ibm.com/blogs/research/2019/10/on-quantum-suprem...
- rsln-s 6y ago
  Not necessarily true. Google's result used a programmable universal quantum computer for a specific task; the point of the experiment was not just to show that it can do this specific convoluted task faster than classical supercomputers, but also to show how powerful the quantum computer they've built is and how well they can control it. What they then did is go on a publish a dozen papers of running many other algorithms on it (of course, for those algorithms the quantum computer is not yet powerful enough to show advantage). On the other hand, the device used in this experiment is a single-purpose non-universal sampler with very limited applications.
ArtWomb 6y ago
Just this week, China has achieved photonic quantum computing, planted a flag on the lunar surface, and fired up their "artificial sun" fusion tokamak ;) I really appreciate this write by Scott Aaronson. It anticipates all possible inquiries. And is heavily grounded in CS Theory. The subtext of this open collaboration hints at universal cooperation and co-prosperity. But I fear the fallout may be closer to the "arms race" winner-take-all mentality!
westwing 6y ago
"Maybe Gil Kalai really WON, BY A LOT, before Hugo Chávez hacked the Pan group’s computers to make it seem otherwise?" There is no evidence of widespread scientific fraud coming out of China, according to the China News Service, the People’s Daily and the Global Times.

223 points by apsec112 6y ago

haecceity 6y ago

Mathematician cares about experimental physics because it settles his dispute and satiates his ego.

sanxiyn 6y ago

A great achievement, probably done with much less budget than Google's Sycamore.

fsh 6y ago
I wouldn't be so sure. Jian-Wei Pan is known for having a pretty much unlimited budget. They launched a freaking satellite!
- gpm 6y ago
  And they burnt $400,000 answering a referees comment instead of just saying "because money".

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

Areading314 6y ago

Why are we claiming this was achieved by "China" rather than the responsible scientists? Science is a global cooperative effort, rather than a national competition. Also, link to the actual article: https://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2020/12/02/science.abe8770 https://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2020/12/02/scie...

thefounder 6y ago
>> Why are we claiming this was achieved by "China" rather than the responsible scientists? Because China(chinese people) funded the science? It may also hint that the governance system is productive.
cambalache 6y ago
The same way we claim "the USSR" launched Sputnik, and "America" put a man on the moon.
machinelabo 6y ago
Just today, US/UK had a small exchange over who is best at vaccine approval process: https://www.nytimes.com/live/2020/12/03/world/covid-19-coronavirus/as-the-uk-claims-bragging-rights-for-the-best-vaccine-regulators-yes-really-us-officials-beg-to-differ https://www.nytimes.com/live/2020/12/03/world/covid-19-coron... Any time, any one who brings up their nation as being the best - I've got no room for you in my life. I despise nationalism and national pride in all forms. It only breeds hatred and unproductive relationships, and creates echo chambers. This goes for all countries. We're tiny blobs of muttering meat in the universe. Temporarily here.
- arvinsim 6y ago
  It's natural human instinct to seek tribes.
  - Quekid5 6y ago
    True, but that doesn't mean that it's a good thing or that it shouldn't be resisted.
    - zpeti 6y ago
      To just throw out the evolutionary workings of not only humans, but many of our animal ancestors is extremely naive. You are suggesting you know better than a system that millions of years of evolution have created. You are also assuming that you know all the risks of NOT organising in tribes, that somehow if all humans were some untribal lonely individual entities, the world would work better. Many many billions of people and animals seem to disagree.
      - sgift 6y ago
        We know better than evolution all the time. Else: No medicine, no operations, no science (random list of things, more can be added). Doesn't sound like a very good world to me.
        6y ago
pmoriarty 6y ago
That's funny. Somehow I've never in my life heard this objection regarding American research.
- adventured 6y ago
  Objection is common when the US is used to represent its accomplishments. The objectors usually counter that it's a win for humanity, as a way to debase something positive for the US. Happens in every major thread on HN that involves the US doing something great. See: every significant accomplishment by SpaceX or NASA for a repeating case. If you really want to see objectors get triggered, check out the past threads that tangent off about SpaceX employees chanting USA USA USA on video, that's always quite amusing.
thraway12 6y ago
Because China achieves a comparative security advantage?
stonogo 6y ago
A Chinese citizen, who happens to be the Vice Chair of a Chinese political party, working for the University of Science and Technology of China, using money entirely from the Chinese government, led a team consisting entirely of other Chinese citizens working for Chinese institutions, and you're wondering why we're claiming this was achieved by "China"? Science might be a global cooperative effort, but this paper comes from China.
- xenihn 6y ago
  It feels like anyone who is getting heated over this link and the subsequent discussion didn't even read Scott's post to begin with.
- throwaway4good 6y ago
  One of the things that is interesting about the Chinese political system is the large number of engineers and scientists who also have high political positions. Maybe it is a sign of a society still focused on building stuff rather than redistributing and administrating what is already there.
  - lucian1900 6y ago
    There’s also a tendency for scientists to be Marxists, since dialectical materialism is the philosophy of all science in general.
ngokevin 6y ago
I guess "China" triggers Americans with negative sentiments with as the media always does with us v. them cold war mentality, which gets more clicks. May I ask what alternative title do you suggest, to name the individuals?
- remarkEon 6y ago
  There’s probably a lot of countries that “trigger” Americans with “negative sentiments”. Some justified, some not. Regardless of the justification, keeping track of the scientific progress of a country that has explicitly set out to usurp the US is useful.
  - porpoise 6y ago
    "a country that has explicitly set out to usurp the US is useful" Can you provide some evidence for saying that China "explicitly" set out to do this? The Chinese government has been consistently "explicit" that it does not aim to replace or supplant the US [1][2][3]. Perhaps you mean "actions speak louder than words" and that this intention is evident from the actions they've undertaken, in which case it would be nice to know what actions you have in mind, as well as how you ruled out boring explanations of those actions that China's leaders would have given themselves. [1] https://amp.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy/article/3030717/china-doesnt-want-supplant-us-it-will-keep-growing-beijing https://amp.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy/article/3030717/ch... [2] https://apnews.com/article/1c5193f5eb936b99b740b758da8efad3 https://apnews.com/article/1c5193f5eb936b99b740b758da8efad3 [3] https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.wionews.com/world/not-trying-to-replace-us-as-worlds-top-technological-power-says-china-314222/amp https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.wionews.com/world/not-tryin...
    - remarkEon 6y ago
      >China says >China says >China says Yeah, so, you can actually read the internal leaks from Xi’s speeches and not post planted CCP propaganda. Thanks. Here’s just a sample. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Document_Number_Nine https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Document_Number_Nine Question: is Taiwan its own sovereign state? Certainly feels that way every time I’m there for work.
Melting_Harps 6y ago
> Science is a global cooperative effort, rather than a national competition. Haha... that's not at all the case; academics are petty people with fragile egos who are often under the thumb of lab directors with even worse egos and often come into that role with an ax to grind. Racism, be it veiled or otherwise, is also no stranger to the realms of Science. Much less the dregs called the peer-reviewed system. Consider the plight of Dr. He Jiankui who many researchers in the West lauded in private, but scorned in public when the 'evil Chinese Scientist' revealed his results to the Public because grant money and political standing were at risk. Collaborations are limited in so far as their personal utility for more grants or prestige, lets not elevate researchers and their horrible practices to places they do not belong. I think you would find the process entirely sad and depressing, as most of us did in our undergrad, when you see it for what it really is.
- luc4sdreyer 6y ago
  >who many researchers in the West lauded in private I've only heard universal condemnation from scientists, where can I learn more about this private support for him? Or am I going to take your word for it?
  - Melting_Harps 6y ago
    > Or am I going to take your word for it? Not necessary, but I'm just going to assume you aren't a biologist nor do you follow the Bio-hacker culture, right? Start with Josiah Zayner's talks from the time of that event. I think it was in the conference ahead of the trailer release of 'Code of the Wild' that stands out. But he's on record talking about it as well, I think Dr. Church also touched on it as well. The Bio Hack the Planet conference talks might also have more details, as I recall him talking about the events leading up to Dr. Doudna's misplaced/misunderstood role in CRISPR that eventually got her a Nobel Prize and it segued into that discussion, too. Back on PC Edit: This piece [0] is also worth a read, here is an excerpt from Science: > Yet opposition was not unanimous. A few months before He met the couples, a committee convened by the U.S. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) concluded in a well-publicized report that human trials of germline editing "might be permitted" if strict criteria were met. The group of scientists, lawyers, bioethicists, and patient advocates spelled out a regulatory framework but cautioned that "these criteria are necessarily vague" because various societies, caregivers, and patients would view them differently. The committee notably did not call for an international ban, arguing instead for governmental regulation as each country deemed appropriate and "voluntary self-regulation pursuant to professional guidelines." >> That circle included leading scientists—among them a Nobel laureate—in China and the United States, business executives, an entrepreneur connected to venture capitalists, authors of the NASEM report, a controversial U.S. IVF specialist who discussed opening a gene-editing clinic with He, and at least one Chinese politician. "He had an awful lot of company to be called a ‘rogue,’" says geneticist George Church, a CRISPR pioneer at Harvard University who was not in the circle of trust and is one of the few scientists to defend at least some aspects of He's experiment. The questionable stance, and reluctance comes when academic researchers know that their grants and good standing with a chosen University (and the prestige and clout they garner) comes under threat. Maybe its because I've seen this kind of thing play out in real time when I was in School and then entered the Industry that I'm not all surprised by it... but it's also a sense of remorse mixed with dread and despair as a person who was on track to be a lab Clinical Lab Scientist but what disgusted at what 'really happens' internally that shaped my view(s) and made me leave the Industry entirely. 0: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/08/untold-story-circle-trust-behind-world-s-first-gene-edited-babies https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/08/untold-story-circle-...
wly_cdgr 6y ago
Crazy as it may seem, it's because it was done by Chinese scientists working and living in China
telaelit 6y ago
The US always has to propagandize news from China since they are an economic rival. Did they run the headline “America achieves quantum supremacy” when Google supposedly achieved quantum supremacy? Nope.
knolax 6y ago
And yet nobody ever brings up this objection when it's negative press.
rkangel 6y ago
For roughly the same reason that the first example of quantum supremacy we attribute to Google rather than individual scientists. I actually know the names of the Chinese responsible, I couldn't tell you the names of anyone on the Google team. I also wonder how the Google result was reported in China. I wouldn't be surprised if it was reported as "Americans have done X".

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

cambalache 6y ago

> When I refereed the Science paper, I asked why the authors directly verified the results of their experiment only for up to 26-30 photons, relying on plausible extrapolations beyond that. While directly verifying the results of n-photon BosonSampling takes ~2n time for any known classical algorithm, I said, surely it should be possible with existing computers to go up to n=40 or n=50? A couple weeks later, the authors responded, saying that they’d now verified their results up to n=40, but it burned $400,000 worth of supercomputer time so they decided to stop there. This was by far the most expensive referee report I ever wrote! They should have requested AWS free credits :)

blackrock 6y ago

Fascinating. It seems the Chinese scientists achieved this Quantum Supremacy at normal room temperatures, and using standard industrial components used elsewhere in commercial telecom equipment. At first, I thought this was more of a type of single-use quantum circuit, where you can only use it to solve this one problem. And you'd have to build a new rig to solve another function. And on and on, until you sorta get a general purpose super quantum computer, with all these individual rigs solving different functions, that can finally do useful work. Whereas the Google Sycamore is more of a general purpose quantum computer that can be reprogrammed to solve anything. But, this guy believes that this might be a first step to a universal photonic quantum computer. The last part was incredible. They verified the results on a supercomputer, and went up to n=40. But the supercomputer time costed them $400,000. So they decided to stop there. Public Key Crypto Code breaking, here we come. Setec Astronomy [1] [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GutJf9umD9c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GutJf9umD9c

api 6y ago
Most cryptographers think we will see RSA and EC type public key code breaking at least for small keys (<=1024 for RSA, <256 for EC) within 10-15 years. Once that happens we can more or less consider classical asymmetric crypto unsafe since we can assume deep-pocketed adversaries (NSA, FSB, China, etc.) may be ahead of what is publicly disclosed. That's why classically computable but quantum resistant asymmetric cryptography is one of the hottest areas of crypto research right now.
- benlivengood 6y ago
  Does anyone really think the deep pockets of the TLAs haven't already done at least this well, especially with photonics at least? All the theoretical fundamentals have been known for decades. If COTS parts can do this then a focused research program begun decades ago will have already achieved what is public today. Public demonstration to me is just a proof-of-concept validating that state actors achieved parity with it quite a while ago.
  - api 6y ago

est 6y ago

> Also: when Covid first started, and facemasks were plentiful in China but almost impossible to get in the US, Chaoyang Lu, one of the authors of the new work and my sometime correspondent on the theory of BosonSampling, decided to mail me a box of 200 masks (I didn’t ask for it). I don’t think that influenced my later review, but was appreciated nonetheless. Ha

ceilingcorner 6y ago
> facemasks were plentiful in China but almost impossible to get in the US That wasn't a coincidence. > Just after the lockdown of Wuhan in January, the same week the U.S. confirmed its first case of the novel coronavirus, Chinese civic organizations in dozens of countries on five continents began buying masks and other personal protective equipment. > In Nagoya, Japan, volunteers drove to pharmacies and bought 520,000 masks in three days, according to an account carried by Xinhua, China’s official news agency. By Jan. 26, the head of a Chinese chamber of commerce in Toronto, just back from a trip to Beijing, started making calls to members telling them they needed to join the effort, the report said. Almost 100 people drove to Toronto—some overnight, on icy roads—and were dispatched to buy supplies. Planes out of Kenya and Milan were packed with boxes and suitcases filled with PPE bound for China. An overseas Chinese association in Argentina sent some 25,000 masks within a week of receiving the request. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-09-17/behind-china-s-epic-dash-for-ppe-that-left-the-world-short-on-masks https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-09-17/behind-ch...
- reaperducer 6y ago
  In Nagoya, Japan, volunteers drove to pharmacies and bought 520,000 masks in three days, Seems like it was a global phenomenon. There were articles in the local newspapers where I live (US) interviewing Chinese expats who were buying all the PPE they could find and shipping them home. While it put other countries in a bad position, I think it was probably a perfectly normal thing for an expat to do since people didn't know how bad it would get outside of China at the time. Most times there is a disaster somewhere in the world, the people from that country who live elsewhere try to help.

im3w1l 6y ago

What I like about quantum supremacy is that it finally lays to rest the layman theory that the world is a simulation, and that quantum effects are because of shortcuts and corner cutting. No! Our world is harder to simulate than a classical one, which can only have classical computers.

andrewflnr 6y ago
Why do you think the simulators, if there be such, are limited to classical computers? Why do you think they have limits of any kind? It is impossible in principle to have any evidence about simulationism. All knowledge about everything from logic up is from inside the simulation. Just accept that it's an epistemological tarpit and give up.
- im3w1l 6y ago
  I don't mean dismiss simulation, but I see now how it could be read that way. The key is the second part of the and-clause: quantum stuff being a side effect of a lazy simulator. That's what doesn't hold water.
  - asimovfan 6y ago
    there was a layman assumption like that?
    - hoseja 6y ago
      I've seen it.
  - andrewflnr 6y ago
    I mean to dismiss simulation, so I wouldn't be offended if you did.
- api 6y ago
  This form of world-as-simulation is effectively identical to strong theism. The world exists in the mind of God or runs on some supernatural "hardware" is basically the same thing as saying the world is a beyond-classical simulation.

contemporary343 6y ago

One of the lead authors posted some photos of the setup on twitter: https://twitter.com/chaoyanglu/status/1334684227342725120 https://twitter.com/chaoyanglu/status/1334684227342725120 Quite incredible! And for anyone who's worked in optics or photonics, a real experimental feat. (just look at that table!)

fsh 6y ago
Beautiful setup! On the flip side this looks extremely hard to scale. I wonder how many students were required just to align this thing.
- throwaway4good 6y ago
  Funny. To me this looks like something that can be turned into a commercial product.
  - throwaway4good 6y ago
    Obviously it won't go into your phone any time soon but as a specialised piece of hardware sold for +100k usd to universities and companies who can actually use it.
    - mpfundstein 6y ago
      and thats a market
      - throwaway4good 6y ago
        it is
  - fsh 6y ago
    Anything can be turned into a product. The appeal of chip-based technologies such as superconducting qbits or integrated photonics is that one could at least in theory scale them to orders of magnitude larger sizes. This is simply not possible with macroscopic mirrors and beam splitters on steel posts.

ochronus 6y ago

Title sounds like the next Civ game ;)

prower 6y ago

Sorry for the off-topic, but I can't help thinking about the title of the news as something straight out of Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri :)

iExploder 6y ago
It is every citizen's final duty to go into the tanks, and become one with all the people. — Chairman Sheng-ji Yang, "Ethics for Tomorrow"
- uCantCauseUCant 6y ago
  Its every chairmans final duty to grow into the chair, and become a mummy on the throne.

diskmuncher 6y ago

The more interesting question may be what innovation was achieved in performing the experiment, mainly I assume, in controlling and measuring the large number of photons accurately. Hints on those seem to be Fig. 2 [1]. In the spirit of sensationalizing "China" and "supremacy", does anyone know if this technology is relevant to some Star Wars weaponry for example? [1] https://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2020/12/02/science.abe8770/tab-figures-data https://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2020/12/02/scie...

rsln-s 6y ago
It's not control of individuals photons (that would be boson sampling), but gaussian pulses. Still a tour-de-force of a demonstration, but actual practical implications are very limited.

ngcc_hk 6y ago

Look at the Q&a what is the significance ... other than the communist did it 1 year after google ?

emerged 6y ago

That’s very cool, although I’d imagine that several nations have much stronger quantum tech than what is made public. Hasn’t it always been that way?

pera 6y ago

I feel a bit embarrassed for asking, but can someone explain in layman's terms why the Gaussian boson sampling experiment proves quantum supremacy? I believe my main confusion is why is this experiment being called a computation: to me this seems to be simply the observation of some physical phenomena which happens to be very hard to calculate with a classical computer.

monboddo 6y ago
I think here computation does not mean general programmability, rather just a single narrow problem. A classical computer running a predefined program would be hard to calculate on pen and paper, so there is silicon supremacy. Here finding the probability distribution of the outputs is hard classically, hence quantum supremacy.
carapace 6y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analog_computer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analog_computer > An analog computer or analogue computer is a type of computer that uses the continuously changeable aspects of physical phenomena such as electrical, mechanical, or hydraulic quantities to model the problem being solved. In contrast, digital computers represent varying quantities symbolically and by discrete values of both time and amplitude.
- Koshkin 6y ago
  Isn't a quantum computer digital? ("Quantum" and "continuously changeable" sound opposite to each other.)
- pera 6y ago
  Yes but I don't understand how this can be seen as modelling anything but the experiment one is performing: the way I interpret this proof of quantum supremacy is (and again I know this is incorrect but don't know why) almost like selecting any physical phenomena to which a simulation of it is computationally hard, and then say that the result of this experiment is the returned value of a "computation". I feel it's almost like claiming you are going to simulate fluid dynamics with an actual water tank, some dye, and a camera.

dajomu 6y ago

So am I right in thinking that this is a major step towards quantum computing? This looks like the kind of thing that could be scaled and productionised relatively easily compared to other approaches?

littlestymaar 6y ago

I's really a bigger feat than what google achieved last year[1] and yet almost nobody will hear about it because google took all the hype. It's a pretty sad story actually. [1]: the google achievement was designing a specific problem for which their quantum computer could perform better than classical computers. Now, this is a solution to a preexisting problem. Not to say that Google's result wasn't important, but this one is “one rank” higher.

Aardwolf 6y ago
We hear about it here now, and it's a more recent achievement so of course it's bigger, it wouldn't be an achievement if it was smaller than the state of the art of a year ago
- littlestymaar 6y ago
  It's not just bigger, it's an order of magnitude bigger. Actually, some people weren't totally convinced that Google's result really deserved the “quantum supremacy” label. Sure, the guys at IBM[1] were a bit bitter, but their argument make sense (and they weren't alone on that). This result unambiguously deserve such qualification: this the kind of results everybody expected to be called “Quantum supremacy”, so that's a bit sad that they won't get as much credit as google's team. [1]: https://www.ibm.com/blogs/research/2019/10/on-quantum-supremacy/ https://www.ibm.com/blogs/research/2019/10/on-quantum-suprem...
rsln-s 6y ago
Not necessarily true. Google's result used a programmable universal quantum computer for a specific task; the point of the experiment was not just to show that it can do this specific convoluted task faster than classical supercomputers, but also to show how powerful the quantum computer they've built is and how well they can control it. What they then did is go on a publish a dozen papers of running many other algorithms on it (of course, for those algorithms the quantum computer is not yet powerful enough to show advantage). On the other hand, the device used in this experiment is a single-purpose non-universal sampler with very limited applications.

ArtWomb 6y ago

Just this week, China has achieved photonic quantum computing, planted a flag on the lunar surface, and fired up their "artificial sun" fusion tokamak ;) I really appreciate this write by Scott Aaronson. It anticipates all possible inquiries. And is heavily grounded in CS Theory. The subtext of this open collaboration hints at universal cooperation and co-prosperity. But I fear the fallout may be closer to the "arms race" winner-take-all mentality!

westwing 6y ago

"Maybe Gil Kalai really WON, BY A LOT, before Hugo Chávez hacked the Pan group’s computers to make it seem otherwise?" There is no evidence of widespread scientific fraud coming out of China, according to the China News Service, the People’s Daily and the Global Times.