6 ms·

Photonic Quantum Advantage?

43 points by nsoonhui 6y ago

mandragon 6y ago
Art of War: Appear weak when you are strong. IME, it's plausible that nation/state strat pertinent to QC advances is to hide the true extent of cutting edge breakthroughs. This makes sense considering what's at stake. China is suspected to engage in bioengineering for their soldiers and it's not a stretch to speculate they also seek such synthetic advantages with their vast armies of engineers and scientists. This would lay fertile ground for secret breakthroughs in, e.g., QC. I assume that both China and USA/fyev seek to obtain secret radical advances in key areas such as QC. The urgency for adopting quantum resistant crypto suggests such concerns might be shared by powers that be. QC breakthroughs are unpredictable, so the smart move is to assume the enemy could make secret advances at any time.
- bawolff 6y ago
  So they are going to hide their breakthroughs by announcing their breakthroughs?
  - mandragon 6y ago
    If that's the case here, then it isn't indicative of any secret progress.
  - geomark 6y ago
    Or maybe it's a misdirection to get the enemy to go down a path they know is a deadend. Or a lure to get the enemy to work harder on a problem so they can steal the solution. Or fake so that the enemy spends more resources faster. Or any of many other possible scenarios. It's a nonstop game of spy versus spy.
    - mandragon 6y ago
      Yes to all. Mainly, American culture could use a strong dose of reality check. This appears to be the case in terms of publicly stating that we are retooling global intelligence missions from Cold War (t-40yrs) and War on Terror (t-20yrs), to the China threat. Awareness of strategies, capabilities of the enemy, and what's at stake will help reduce Western complacency.
    - bawolff 6y ago
      Is this a troll? Spend some aws credits and verify the results of the paper for higher and higher numbers, if you don't believe it. I'm not saying china can't be evil, but faking a breakthrough that can be verified (to a certain level) is a next level stupid way of being evil.
      - mandragon 6y ago
        Pretty sure it was just a general comment on the topic of art of war, and not specific to the linked paper.
        bawolff 6y ago
        Pray tell, in your view, what is the antecedent of the pronoun "it" in geomark's comment, if not the paper in question?
        mandragon 6y ago
        Snarky tone of your response put aside: Whether the comment was incorrect in this case related to the paper in question doesn't invalidate the strategy, generally. Might be easier to pass scientific misinfo/disinfo if it were more difficult to reproduce, of course. The comment was likely done in haste, meant to convey general strat that warrants consideration when examining the paper -- but could be easily invalidated, as you pointed out.
        geomark 6y ago
        Correct. It doesn't have to be fake. It could be a very real breakthrough. Then the possibilities branch out. Taking the next step might require huge resources. Will the enemy take that on? If so, can you just watch and spy, saving your own resources to apply to other or more promising efforts? Some people might think this is all just being too imaginative. But that is what the spooks are constantly doing, creating layer upon layer of misdirection and obfuscation. To wit, a sibling comment[1] about the Star Wars program. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25329030 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25329030
  - nine_k 6y ago
    Does anyone remember the "star wars" program of early 1980s? It was a massive fraud smoke-and-mirrors program to lure the USSR into an area of weapon development where it could not sustain itself economically. It included plans to build a colossal network of space-borne X-ray lasers powered by nuclear blasts, which would be able to destroy ICBMs before they finished acceleration and deployed warheads and decoys. This would allow the US to break out of the mutually-assured destruction balance. None of that was true. The US did not (and still do not) have a technology to produce nuke-powered X-ray lasers. The US did not have the launch capacity to deploy the advertised number of space platforms. Not nearly. Still, this was (or is believed to be) instrumental in the peaceful demise of USSR due to extreme economic difficulties resulting from a symmetric effort.
    - s1artibartfast 6y ago
      It might not have been fatally flawed, but it wasn’t completely smoke and mirrors. It was a real an research program employing scientists and engineers that built and tested laser platforms for deployment. It wasn’t viable using contemporary technology, but neither is commercial fusion power, and we have been working on it for several decades. Would you consider ITER smoke and mirrors?
      - nine_k 6y ago
        Yes, but I think that the achieved advances have been greatly exaggerated, IIRC.
- icapybara 6y ago
  > China is suspected to engage in bioengineering for their soldiers and it's not a stretch to speculate they also seek such synthetic advantages with their vast armies of engineers and scientists. This would lay fertile ground for secret breakthroughs in, e.g., QC. In which a HN commenter proclaims that China can build a working quantum computer by bioengineering their scientists to be smarter.
  - mandragon 6y ago
    I speculated that they may seek to use eugenics, nootropics or other methods to enhance the performance of their (vast) pool of scientists and engineers. This would offer a strategic advantage in accelerating such development, but would assure nothing. The phrasing of your response re-interpretating/rephrasing my statement is misleading/inaccurate.
- klyrs 6y ago
  Does this apply to Google's supremacy announcement and IBM's classical challenge to that?
  - SuoDuanDao 6y ago
    If those two are following Sun Tzu's advice, they'd probably be attempting to appear strong where they are weak.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
Shoriokoye 6y ago
The photonic quantum computer generates up to 76 output photon clicks, which yields an output state-space dimension of 1030 and a sampling rate that is ~1014 faster than using the state-of-the-art simulation strategy and supercomputers.
georgeburdell 6y ago
I can't intuit whether "advantage" has some specific meaning here, but an advantage, in the dictionary definition sense, is the fact that photonic quantum systems easily operate at room temperature, unlike, say, electron-based systems.
- krastanov 6y ago
  "Quantum Advantage" and the synonymous "Quantum Supremacy" (considered somewhat inappropriate because of other uses of the same word in racist orgs) are recently established "terms of art" in this field. They refer to "an experiment that unambiguously demonstrates computational capabilities unreachable by a classical supercomputer". Importantly, it is not really expected that the computation in question would be something useful, rather just something classically difficult as a proof of concept. I would say "useful quantum supremacy/advantage" experiments are not yet demonstrated and will take a few more years (maybe almost a decade). Still, the progress since conceiving this field in the early 90s is astronomical.
  - josefx 6y ago
    > considered somewhat inappropriate because of other uses of the same word in racist orgs are we really in a time where "double plus good" is the only acceptable way to indicate that something is better or do we have to point out that racists probably also used each of these words in problematic contexts?
    - virgilp 6y ago
      Apparently, yes. Lots of organizations felt the need to rename the master branch, so, what other proof do you need? As a side note, I grew up in communism, and it would be funny if it wouldn't be sad how much of a feeling of deja-vu this all is. Many people mistake this for a form of "enlightenment" but it's really just a form of herd behavior most of the time :(
    - bawolff 6y ago
      Naively, i kind of feel like advantage is a better term. Supremacy feels like it has implications that quantum computers have overcome all obstacles, which seems a bit much for a contrived problem with no real world applications
dwohnitmok 6y ago
Looks like Scott Aaronson acknowledges this as a potential real issue in an update to his previous blog post (https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=5122 https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=5122). I'll be curious to see where this goes...

43 points by nsoonhui 6y ago

Art of War: Appear weak when you are strong. IME, it's plausible that nation/state strat pertinent to QC advances is to hide the true extent of cutting edge breakthroughs. This makes sense considering what's at stake. China is suspected to engage in bioengineering for their soldiers and it's not a stretch to speculate they also seek such synthetic advantages with their vast armies of engineers and scientists. This would lay fertile ground for secret breakthroughs in, e.g., QC. I assume that both China and USA/fyev seek to obtain secret radical advances in key areas such as QC. The urgency for adopting quantum resistant crypto suggests such concerns might be shared by powers that be. QC breakthroughs are unpredictable, so the smart move is to assume the enemy could make secret advances at any time.

bawolff 6y ago
So they are going to hide their breakthroughs by announcing their breakthroughs?
- mandragon 6y ago
  If that's the case here, then it isn't indicative of any secret progress.
- geomark 6y ago
  Or maybe it's a misdirection to get the enemy to go down a path they know is a deadend. Or a lure to get the enemy to work harder on a problem so they can steal the solution. Or fake so that the enemy spends more resources faster. Or any of many other possible scenarios. It's a nonstop game of spy versus spy.
  - mandragon 6y ago
    Yes to all. Mainly, American culture could use a strong dose of reality check. This appears to be the case in terms of publicly stating that we are retooling global intelligence missions from Cold War (t-40yrs) and War on Terror (t-20yrs), to the China threat. Awareness of strategies, capabilities of the enemy, and what's at stake will help reduce Western complacency.
  - bawolff 6y ago
    Is this a troll? Spend some aws credits and verify the results of the paper for higher and higher numbers, if you don't believe it. I'm not saying china can't be evil, but faking a breakthrough that can be verified (to a certain level) is a next level stupid way of being evil.
    - mandragon 6y ago
      Pretty sure it was just a general comment on the topic of art of war, and not specific to the linked paper.
      - bawolff 6y ago
        Pray tell, in your view, what is the antecedent of the pronoun "it" in geomark's comment, if not the paper in question?
        mandragon 6y ago
        Snarky tone of your response put aside: Whether the comment was incorrect in this case related to the paper in question doesn't invalidate the strategy, generally. Might be easier to pass scientific misinfo/disinfo if it were more difficult to reproduce, of course. The comment was likely done in haste, meant to convey general strat that warrants consideration when examining the paper -- but could be easily invalidated, as you pointed out.
      - geomark 6y ago
        Correct. It doesn't have to be fake. It could be a very real breakthrough. Then the possibilities branch out. Taking the next step might require huge resources. Will the enemy take that on? If so, can you just watch and spy, saving your own resources to apply to other or more promising efforts? Some people might think this is all just being too imaginative. But that is what the spooks are constantly doing, creating layer upon layer of misdirection and obfuscation. To wit, a sibling comment[1] about the Star Wars program. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25329030 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25329030
- nine_k 6y ago
  Does anyone remember the "star wars" program of early 1980s? It was a massive fraud smoke-and-mirrors program to lure the USSR into an area of weapon development where it could not sustain itself economically. It included plans to build a colossal network of space-borne X-ray lasers powered by nuclear blasts, which would be able to destroy ICBMs before they finished acceleration and deployed warheads and decoys. This would allow the US to break out of the mutually-assured destruction balance. None of that was true. The US did not (and still do not) have a technology to produce nuke-powered X-ray lasers. The US did not have the launch capacity to deploy the advertised number of space platforms. Not nearly. Still, this was (or is believed to be) instrumental in the peaceful demise of USSR due to extreme economic difficulties resulting from a symmetric effort.
  - s1artibartfast 6y ago
    It might not have been fatally flawed, but it wasn’t completely smoke and mirrors. It was a real an research program employing scientists and engineers that built and tested laser platforms for deployment. It wasn’t viable using contemporary technology, but neither is commercial fusion power, and we have been working on it for several decades. Would you consider ITER smoke and mirrors?
    - nine_k 6y ago
      Yes, but I think that the achieved advances have been greatly exaggerated, IIRC.
icapybara 6y ago
> China is suspected to engage in bioengineering for their soldiers and it's not a stretch to speculate they also seek such synthetic advantages with their vast armies of engineers and scientists. This would lay fertile ground for secret breakthroughs in, e.g., QC. In which a HN commenter proclaims that China can build a working quantum computer by bioengineering their scientists to be smarter.
- mandragon 6y ago
  I speculated that they may seek to use eugenics, nootropics or other methods to enhance the performance of their (vast) pool of scientists and engineers. This would offer a strategic advantage in accelerating such development, but would assure nothing. The phrasing of your response re-interpretating/rephrasing my statement is misleading/inaccurate.
klyrs 6y ago
Does this apply to Google's supremacy announcement and IBM's classical challenge to that?
- SuoDuanDao 6y ago
  If those two are following Sun Tzu's advice, they'd probably be attempting to appear strong where they are weak.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]

Shoriokoye 6y ago

The photonic quantum computer generates up to 76 output photon clicks, which yields an output state-space dimension of 1030 and a sampling rate that is ~1014 faster than using the state-of-the-art simulation strategy and supercomputers.

georgeburdell 6y ago

I can't intuit whether "advantage" has some specific meaning here, but an advantage, in the dictionary definition sense, is the fact that photonic quantum systems easily operate at room temperature, unlike, say, electron-based systems.

krastanov 6y ago
"Quantum Advantage" and the synonymous "Quantum Supremacy" (considered somewhat inappropriate because of other uses of the same word in racist orgs) are recently established "terms of art" in this field. They refer to "an experiment that unambiguously demonstrates computational capabilities unreachable by a classical supercomputer". Importantly, it is not really expected that the computation in question would be something useful, rather just something classically difficult as a proof of concept. I would say "useful quantum supremacy/advantage" experiments are not yet demonstrated and will take a few more years (maybe almost a decade). Still, the progress since conceiving this field in the early 90s is astronomical.
- josefx 6y ago
  > considered somewhat inappropriate because of other uses of the same word in racist orgs are we really in a time where "double plus good" is the only acceptable way to indicate that something is better or do we have to point out that racists probably also used each of these words in problematic contexts?
  - virgilp 6y ago
    Apparently, yes. Lots of organizations felt the need to rename the master branch, so, what other proof do you need? As a side note, I grew up in communism, and it would be funny if it wouldn't be sad how much of a feeling of deja-vu this all is. Many people mistake this for a form of "enlightenment" but it's really just a form of herd behavior most of the time :(
  - bawolff 6y ago
    Naively, i kind of feel like advantage is a better term. Supremacy feels like it has implications that quantum computers have overcome all obstacles, which seems a bit much for a contrived problem with no real world applications

dwohnitmok 6y ago

Looks like Scott Aaronson acknowledges this as a potential real issue in an update to his previous blog post (https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=5122 https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=5122). I'll be curious to see where this goes...