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Physicists challenge Google’s ‘quantum advantage’
- sabas123 6y agoCan we get an edit on the titel? This article is about an upcoming publication by a team from China and has nothing to do with Google nor it being challenged.
- thoughtsimple 6y agoThe title of the article is "Physicists in China challenge Google's 'quantum advantage'. And the article does refute Google's claims of quantum advantage with references. "But some quantum researchers contested the claim, on the grounds that a better classical algorithm that would outperform the quantum one could exist3. And researchers at IBM claimed that its classical supercomputers could in principle already run existing algorithms to do the same calculations in 2.5 days." I'm not sure what you would change the title to. This one seems to accurately describe the article.
- mellosouls 6y agoClearly "in China" is missing, though your other points are correct.
- thoughtsimple 6y agoIs there some reason why the origin of the experiment is relevant?
- mellosouls 6y agoTitles shouldn't be editorialised without good reason, as per the guidelines. It's no more than that.
- mxcrossb 6y agoThe Chinese experiment is rather well known so I think it being in the title gives good context to the reader. Ironically, this article is from December third, so the Chinese experiment being well known is only because past articles like this!
- aaron695 6y agoFor starters Chinese researchers lie differently to how Western researchers lie. Secondly it's exciting to see countries around the world do cutting edge research, like Japan bringing back the Ryugu samples. Thirdly it's HN rules to copy the original article title. Fourthly "Physicists challenge Google’s ‘quantum advantage’" implies the profession of Physicists are saying Google’s ‘quantum advantage’ is incorrect or something.
- jonas21 6y agoI think the issue is that the word "challenge" has two common usages in English: 1. to engage in competition 2. to dispute the truth or validity of And the article uses the word in both senses -- the headline is that Chinese physicists are challenging Google in the first sense. But the article body mentions that other researchers have challenged the Google result in the second sense. Overall, it seems like a confusing choice of words by whoever wrote the headline.
- mardiyah 6y agoExcellent!
- mellosouls 6y agoI agree the title is incorrect and needs fixing; actual title: Physicists in China challenge Google’s ‘quantum advantage’ But - rightly or wrongly - Google's earlier claim figures heavily in the article also.
- mountainboy 6y agoFrom the article: "A quantum computer, however, can sidestep the brute-force calculation by simulating the quantum process directly — allowing bosons to interfere and sampling the resulting distribution." Uhhmmmm... it sounds to me like they are performing an experiment and measuring the results. It's not a simulation if you actually perform the physical experiment. This seems a bit like saying "A hurricane will simulate a hurricane better and much faster than a supercomputer". Umm, true enough, I guess. But can you make a hurricane do anything useful besides just being a hurricane?
- ew6082 6y agoExactly. This sounds like pure propaganda. They're measuring experimental results and calling it a computer.
- mrfox321 6y agoBy your logic, all classical computers are measuring voltages and calling them bits. A computer is just an experiment, right? All of the awesome things we build with computers are just propaganda.
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- ew6082 6y agoPerhaps its a bad article, but I can't see the value of solving the boson sampling problem by sampling bosons having any application in general computing.
- wyattpeak 6y agoIt depends how general you mean, I reckon. I don't know enough about physics to know how important boson sampling is, but simulating other systems in particle physics is already one of the big-ticket uses of supercomputers today.
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- oefrha 6y agoBetter source: https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=5122 https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=5122 Discussed at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25296469 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25296469
- mensetmanusman 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!” Whoa!
- JohnJamesRambo 6y agoHow is something like that budgeted? The grants I worked on needed justification to buy extra Kimwipes it felt like. Certainly not 400k lying around in case you need it.
- caf 6y agoI feel like the business case "this will let us get the paper into Science" probably stacks up pretty well.
- dekhn 6y agoMany scientists burn millions of dollars to get a science paper.
- oefrha 6y agoGiven that this is supercomputer time we’re talking about, likely from a national computing center, I doubt they paid in cash or grant money for it. They probably have X amount of time pre-allotted, or managed to apply for some more. Then translated the compute spent on the problem to a dollar amount to illustrate the rough amount of resources spent.
- avmich 6y agoCorrect technical term is, AFAIU, "quantum supremacy". Ability to do computations using quantum computer which would take infeasibly long time on classic computer.
- mdoms 6y agoThis is addressed in the article.
- ahelwer 6y agoTerm of art has been changed from supremacy to advantage, to avoid evoking e.g. white supremacy. It's pretty hard to find a benign usage of supremacy actually.
- selimthegrim 6y agosupremacy of law and order; supremacy of constitution; maybe more commonly used in non-racist sense is paramountcy (but has colonial overtones)
- lupire 6y agoThere's "quantum supremacy".
- 6nf 6y agoReally, is that the reason? Do you have any sources explaining this? Seems insane, 'supremacy' just makes me think of Jason Bourne movies, not racism.
- ahelwer 6y agoHere you go, letter published in Nature explaining the reasoning: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-03781-0 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-03781-0 It really isn't a big deal, the field is trying to be more welcoming to people. Not sure why this is "insane".
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- mdoms 6y agoThis is no more a computer than my pool table is. I can simulate particular physical interactions to a very high degree of accuracy with it.
- l33tman 6y agoThe analogy is more like: what if your pool table is the only "computer" in the world, could you map any real other problems you have onto that "computer"? I'm pretty sure you would come up with some clever mappings.
- bjornsing 6y agoLike I said about the Google supremacy/advantage demonstration: the line between quantum computer and physics experiment is razor thin...
- lupire 6y agoSame for regular computer. The importance is if the physica experiment can be used to compute an unrated mathematical problem. See also the Water Integrator. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_integrator https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_integrator
- l33tman 6y agoVery interesting - "digital" quantum computers are certainly not the only useful quantum computing devices possible. This somewhat related physics stackexchange question and various answers came to mind: https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/8169/is-analog-quantum-computation-not-useful https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/8169/is-analog-q...
- adamnemecek 6y agoI’m pumped for analog quantum computers.
- ethn 6y agoThe Quantum Computer scientists Scott Aaronson and Gil Kalai have casted doubt on this result[1][2]. Also good to note is that Kalai casted doubt on the original Google supremacy result. There are now classical algorithms 6 orders of magnitude faster than the Google quantum experiment[3]. 1.https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=5122 https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=5122 2.https://gilkalai.wordpress.com/2020/12/06/photonic-huge-quantum-advantage/ https://gilkalai.wordpress.com/2020/12/06/photonic-huge-quan... 3.https://arxiv.org/abs/1910.09534 https://arxiv.org/abs/1910.09534
- raverbashing 6y agoI think computational researchers will end up figuring P=NP just to spite the quantum computing people
- sampo 6y agoThat was funny. But there would still remain cases where quantum computers would give a speedup. For example, Grover's algorithm speeds up the search through unordered list from O(N) to O(√N).
- nathias 6y agoWhy are they trying to replace advantage for supremacy? Do people not feel horrified by this?
- throwaway3699 6y agoPeople won't push back against this for fear of getting sacked or blackli... blocklisted out of their field.
- SquareWheel 6y agoA more charitable interpretation is that people consider changing a single word to be a minor inconvenience at worst, and a betterment of the field at best.
- nathias 6y agoI think of it as a mainstream acceptance of a morally repugnant word-view ...
- credit_guy 6y ago> But the calculation in this case is a ‘#P-hard problem’, which is even harder than notoriously tricky NP-hard problems Maybe someone can help me here. Wikipedia [1] states this about #P -complete problems: "A polynomial-time algorithm for solving a #P-complete problem, if it existed, would solve the P versus NP problem by implying that P and NP are equal." So, would the statement of the article imply that P=NP? That would be quite a big deal, wouldn't it? Now, the statement talks about #P-hard, wikipedia about #P-complete. Does this make a difference? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E2%99%AFP-complete https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E2%99%AFP-complete
- asddubs 6y agoI think the key is "polynomial-time algorithm", whereas according to the article, they're "sidestep[ping] the brute-force calculation by simulating the quantum process directly"
- mardiyah 6y agoUnfortunately it's likely to turns out to be spoof: https://gilkalai.wordpress.com/2020/12/29/the-argument-against-quantum-computers-a-very-short-introduction/ https://gilkalai.wordpress.com/2020/12/29/the-argument-again...