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I take issue with one part of this. Disclaimer, I work for D-Wave.... > It is unclear how exactly one can verify that a "quantum code" actually runs on a quant

I take issue with one part of this. Disclaimer, I work for D-Wave.... > It is unclear how exactly one can verify that a "quantum code" actually runs on a quantum computer (instead of a classical node inserted between the cloud and the QC provider), and there is a huge window for fraud there. I would like to know what the article's author would take as proof of this. All I can offer presently is my personal assurance as a team member helping to keep D-Wave Leap running. Every day, I work with a team of talented scientists, engineers, devops, and developers to help ensure everything from pipeline performance to monitoring cryogenics, and if there's one thing that I am certain of, it's that our end user submissions run on real hardware at a few millikelvin about absolute zero. I am certain beyond any shadow of a doubt that we are using quantum effects to achieve low-energy solutions to difficult problems using annealing. I'm also certain that we're making huge progress; from our massive lead in terms of raw qubit count (5000+) to our work making each of those qubits connect to more and more of their neighbours with less noise over time. There are exciting things coming.... If other companies are getting away with anything less and promising they're doing real-time quantum computing in the cloud, (1) it would be a huge surprise, and (2) their lives must be a lot cushier than ours, because it is a lot of work keeping something like this running. You want to talk about the woes of having to manage on-prem and hybrid cloud workloads, well, does your datacenter have plumbing for liquid helium? You monitor the temperature on a few server racks, but do you have to measure ten thousand different datapoints about air and fluid temperature and pressure? Honestly, it's a lot of fun, it's an exciting thing to be working on, and I don't agree with the author when he complains about brain drain. You want brain drain, go and look at the infinitum of startups hawking SaaS grift-ware like it's the next best thing since sliced bread. Sorry if we find it more interesting to work on this than on the next B2B way of slicing off a chunk of someone else's revenue for providing something obvious. "We do these things because they are hard", as the saying goes.

reikonomusha 5y ago
To add to this as a former employee of a different quantum company that provides cloud services, there was absolutely no funny business about faking results. If you asked for quantum computer results, you got them, and it’s painfully obvious too. Obviously it’s in the realm of possibility that a company could fake, but I think if anybody was caught doing that, they’d tank their reputation within the community extraordinarily quickly. I haven’t heard of any serious or reputable company doing this. As for other things you’ve said, I definitely disagree with you and agree with the article that there is brain drain. That’s not to say every commercial entity is fully or continuously responsible for it, but DWave, IBM, Google, and every other company that currently or formerly over-promises or outright lies has drawn people out of academia into frequently senseless industrial positions.
- normac2 5y ago
  > To add to this as a former employee of a different quantum company that provides cloud services, there was absolutely no funny business about faking results. If you asked for quantum computer results, you got them, and it’s painfully obvious too. As someone totally unfamiliar with this world, I'm wondering why it's painfully obvious? Slow?
  - reikonomusha 5y ago
    The results look terrible and incredibly noisy. Throw more than a handful of instructions at any quantum computer that’s publicly accessible today, and you’ll get noisy mumbo jumbo. The noise characteristics are pretty signature-like. It’d be an engineering effort unto itself to produce realistic-looking noise models and simulations.
- mikewave 5y ago
  > but DWave, IBM, Google, and every other company that currently or formerly over-promises or outright lies has drawn people out of academia into frequently senseless industrial positions. In those industrial positions, these people are afforded a place to do scientific research that is outside the university proper, but where they can still publish papers, collaborate, release the results of their research to the world, etc. I think it's valuable, as not every researcher wants to work in the confines of academia. I worked in academia myself, albeit doing far more HN-poster typical things than a researcher would do, and while it can be an amazing experience, it's also a much lower salary, and you're not at all surrounded by the same energy, sense of purpose, and rapid pace of change. You're also dealing with lower budgets and lower expectations when the goal is purely to publish papers instead of creating actual, functioning devices that are not only workable, but eventually useful (which is a pre-requisite to being profitable in the long term).
  - reikonomusha 5y ago
    There’s some truth to what you say but I think understanding that truth requires a lot of context and nuance, which I don’t think is easy to do here on a comment forum. On the flip side, it’s not all roses in the quantum industry. There’s more pressure (implicitly and often explicitly) to demo, dazzle, and deliver on “innovation”. Mass layoffs, re-orgs, change of management, hyper-pressurized funding rounds, investor and board pressure, CEO “realignment”, etc. all happen in this sector of the quantum biz. Entire departments—even whole companies—of scientists are funded to work with “industry partners” to solve “industrial problems”, problems for which there’s no published evidence of advantage. A scientist in such a department squeezes out a paper that’s of little, and dare I say completely inconsequential value from time to time.
jacquesm 5y ago
That's fine, but until the results outshine the conventional solutions there is no way for an outsider to tell how they were obtained.
- reikonomusha 5y ago
  Even this is becoming less true with access to deeper levels of various vendors’ stacks. It’s possible to actually do pulse-level experiments on various platforms, where the results will match theoretical predictions. Again, to fake that has no benefit to anyone and in fact would take an enormous amount of work to create a time-domain solver. For just a handful of qubits, it’s not even feasible, at least to do it accurately.
  - JanisErdmanis 5y ago
    There is no enormous work needed to create a time domain solver. Libraries like `QuantumOptics.jl` and analogous on Matlab, Python and Mathematica let's you define the Hamiltonian of an idealized system and solve it. For 16 qubits the matrix size (dimension) is 2^16=65536, can be solved very quickly on a local machine. Furthermore the Hamiltonian matrix is sparse enabling more optimizations. At the moment state of the art supercomputer can simulate 47 qubits. For 46 the necessary resources are about 4 times smaller. So with handful you meant order of 30 then yes. Only a handful of qubits.
    - reikonomusha 5y ago
      A supercomputer cannot simulate a realistic noise model of 30-40 qubits. It can simulate stochastic Pauli channel noise, but that’s a toy, and it would be ungodly slow anyway. A density operator representing a mixed state of n qubits grows as 2^(n^2), or a system with leakage into the second and third excited states grows as 4^(n^2). For just 4 qubits, this would be a 4 billion complex numbers, so 8 billion floating point numbers. Even this isn’t a time-domain solution, where you might in practice need to solve the Lindblad master equation. This is all assuming we have a model for the noise, which in practice is highly non-trivial and very dependent on both the implementation of the qubits as well as their geometrical and material construction, and would take a good deal of science and engineering work to do accurately in a way that it reflects both control dynamics and a specific manufactured sample. Yes there are solvers on the market in Python and Julia, but they don’t give you realistic noise computations for “free”.
prof-dr-ir 5y ago
If all you can offer is your "personal assurance" then that seems to exactly confirms the author's point. From my reading the article's point was really to note the risk of fraud. It did not claim that this kind of fraud is actually happening now. I also think that the article is more nuanced on the topic of brain drain than you make it out to be. Is your argument not just whataboutery? And what do you think of the article's claim that "it may not be a zero-sum game"?
- reikonomusha 5y ago
  The thing is, the hardware doesn’t do anything useful. So you can in theory fake bad results… but that doesn’t seem so dangerous. If it’s bad, there are few people to defraud, except maybe investors that are bad at due diligence. You can also try to fake good results (or even have truly good results!), and trust me, the scientific community will require unambiguous proof. DWave went through the wringer pretty thoroughly some years ago for their claims. There’s another angle too: If the service actually does something commercially useful or better, in some sense, it might not matter what the specifics of the implementation are. Ultimately customers are going to look at price and performance and make decisions that way.
  - leoc 5y ago
    It might not matter commercially, but it certainly matters from a scientific POV.
    - reikonomusha 5y ago
      The scientific stakeholders aren’t proving themselves with an opaque public cloud API. They’re writing detailed research papers with data that go into peer reviewed journals. The data is pretty profoundly scrutinized by the community. If a scientist or company that purportedly does science doesn't do that, they’re not taken seriously by other members of the scientific community. No one is truly believed at face value. I don’t see any significant probability of bamboozling the community of scientists through abject fraud. And there hasn’t been any such issue yet. (There have been retracted published claims, but the retractions happened as a result of scientific scrutiny.)
unixhero 5y ago
All I have to say is ... /THREAD!!!
MichaelZuo 5y ago
That’s a good mentality to have, working on hard things because they are hard. Have there been any major roadblocks that required a change in direction, or at least reevluation of goals?
chobytes 5y ago
Were currently doing lattice calculations for a class im in, using "big cloud company"s quantum computers. That eats qubits quick, so 5000 qubits sounds luxurious! The organizers dont seem to know specifics about D-wave when Ive asked, but do you think these kinds of simulations will ever be able to be run on D-wave hardware?
Yizahi 5y ago
Please clarify one question for me. From other sources I've understood that what we call today quantum computer basically does something random which can't be reasonably reproduced on conventional computers and because of that we declare that this process was quantum computing. But you can't do specific calculations on them - have some input data, some algorithm and receive usable and verifiable result faster than on conventional computer. Is this in general correct or not?
md2020 5y ago
Unrelated to the article, but as a young SWE (finished undergrad in December 2020) who’s always had a side-interest in physics, how do I end up working at a QC company like DWave? Right now I’m working in embedded systems programming at a semiconductor manufacturing equipment company, and I assume at a company like DWave that also makes hardware the possible SW roles are somewhat similar (embedded, metrology, monitoring, algorithms, etc.). Do you look for physics knowledge in your SWE applicants?
- mikewave 5y ago
  Apply! We have plenty of job openings. Physics and electrical engineering backgrounds are critical for some teams, but for other teams it's not as important. This is a wonderful time to be a younger person in the industry; there are tons of job opportunities and every hiring manager is hungry for talented, dedicated people. That said, we do tend to be hiring for more senior roles, considering the small size of the company. If your goal is to land in QC eventually, make sure to have a really broad skill set, get some experience working on hard projects, and apply every year or so until you find a role in the field. No matter which firm you end up at, it's an exciting industry where you can feel like you're actually helping with a grand human effort to push the state of the art.
omegalulw 5y ago
How close are you to running programs that have exponential speedups with quantum computing? Wouldn't it be trivial to verify that the algorithm ran on real quantum hardware in that case?

reikonomusha 5y ago

To add to this as a former employee of a different quantum company that provides cloud services, there was absolutely no funny business about faking results. If you asked for quantum computer results, you got them, and it’s painfully obvious too. Obviously it’s in the realm of possibility that a company could fake, but I think if anybody was caught doing that, they’d tank their reputation within the community extraordinarily quickly. I haven’t heard of any serious or reputable company doing this. As for other things you’ve said, I definitely disagree with you and agree with the article that there is brain drain. That’s not to say every commercial entity is fully or continuously responsible for it, but DWave, IBM, Google, and every other company that currently or formerly over-promises or outright lies has drawn people out of academia into frequently senseless industrial positions.

normac2 5y ago
> To add to this as a former employee of a different quantum company that provides cloud services, there was absolutely no funny business about faking results. If you asked for quantum computer results, you got them, and it’s painfully obvious too. As someone totally unfamiliar with this world, I'm wondering why it's painfully obvious? Slow?
- reikonomusha 5y ago
  The results look terrible and incredibly noisy. Throw more than a handful of instructions at any quantum computer that’s publicly accessible today, and you’ll get noisy mumbo jumbo. The noise characteristics are pretty signature-like. It’d be an engineering effort unto itself to produce realistic-looking noise models and simulations.
mikewave 5y ago
> but DWave, IBM, Google, and every other company that currently or formerly over-promises or outright lies has drawn people out of academia into frequently senseless industrial positions. In those industrial positions, these people are afforded a place to do scientific research that is outside the university proper, but where they can still publish papers, collaborate, release the results of their research to the world, etc. I think it's valuable, as not every researcher wants to work in the confines of academia. I worked in academia myself, albeit doing far more HN-poster typical things than a researcher would do, and while it can be an amazing experience, it's also a much lower salary, and you're not at all surrounded by the same energy, sense of purpose, and rapid pace of change. You're also dealing with lower budgets and lower expectations when the goal is purely to publish papers instead of creating actual, functioning devices that are not only workable, but eventually useful (which is a pre-requisite to being profitable in the long term).
- reikonomusha 5y ago
  There’s some truth to what you say but I think understanding that truth requires a lot of context and nuance, which I don’t think is easy to do here on a comment forum. On the flip side, it’s not all roses in the quantum industry. There’s more pressure (implicitly and often explicitly) to demo, dazzle, and deliver on “innovation”. Mass layoffs, re-orgs, change of management, hyper-pressurized funding rounds, investor and board pressure, CEO “realignment”, etc. all happen in this sector of the quantum biz. Entire departments—even whole companies—of scientists are funded to work with “industry partners” to solve “industrial problems”, problems for which there’s no published evidence of advantage. A scientist in such a department squeezes out a paper that’s of little, and dare I say completely inconsequential value from time to time.

jacquesm 5y ago

That's fine, but until the results outshine the conventional solutions there is no way for an outsider to tell how they were obtained.

reikonomusha 5y ago
Even this is becoming less true with access to deeper levels of various vendors’ stacks. It’s possible to actually do pulse-level experiments on various platforms, where the results will match theoretical predictions. Again, to fake that has no benefit to anyone and in fact would take an enormous amount of work to create a time-domain solver. For just a handful of qubits, it’s not even feasible, at least to do it accurately.
- JanisErdmanis 5y ago
  There is no enormous work needed to create a time domain solver. Libraries like `QuantumOptics.jl` and analogous on Matlab, Python and Mathematica let's you define the Hamiltonian of an idealized system and solve it. For 16 qubits the matrix size (dimension) is 2^16=65536, can be solved very quickly on a local machine. Furthermore the Hamiltonian matrix is sparse enabling more optimizations. At the moment state of the art supercomputer can simulate 47 qubits. For 46 the necessary resources are about 4 times smaller. So with handful you meant order of 30 then yes. Only a handful of qubits.
  - reikonomusha 5y ago
    A supercomputer cannot simulate a realistic noise model of 30-40 qubits. It can simulate stochastic Pauli channel noise, but that’s a toy, and it would be ungodly slow anyway. A density operator representing a mixed state of n qubits grows as 2^(n^2), or a system with leakage into the second and third excited states grows as 4^(n^2). For just 4 qubits, this would be a 4 billion complex numbers, so 8 billion floating point numbers. Even this isn’t a time-domain solution, where you might in practice need to solve the Lindblad master equation. This is all assuming we have a model for the noise, which in practice is highly non-trivial and very dependent on both the implementation of the qubits as well as their geometrical and material construction, and would take a good deal of science and engineering work to do accurately in a way that it reflects both control dynamics and a specific manufactured sample. Yes there are solvers on the market in Python and Julia, but they don’t give you realistic noise computations for “free”.

prof-dr-ir 5y ago

If all you can offer is your "personal assurance" then that seems to exactly confirms the author's point. From my reading the article's point was really to note the risk of fraud. It did not claim that this kind of fraud is actually happening now. I also think that the article is more nuanced on the topic of brain drain than you make it out to be. Is your argument not just whataboutery? And what do you think of the article's claim that "it may not be a zero-sum game"?

reikonomusha 5y ago
The thing is, the hardware doesn’t do anything useful. So you can in theory fake bad results… but that doesn’t seem so dangerous. If it’s bad, there are few people to defraud, except maybe investors that are bad at due diligence. You can also try to fake good results (or even have truly good results!), and trust me, the scientific community will require unambiguous proof. DWave went through the wringer pretty thoroughly some years ago for their claims. There’s another angle too: If the service actually does something commercially useful or better, in some sense, it might not matter what the specifics of the implementation are. Ultimately customers are going to look at price and performance and make decisions that way.
- leoc 5y ago
  It might not matter commercially, but it certainly matters from a scientific POV.
  - reikonomusha 5y ago
    The scientific stakeholders aren’t proving themselves with an opaque public cloud API. They’re writing detailed research papers with data that go into peer reviewed journals. The data is pretty profoundly scrutinized by the community. If a scientist or company that purportedly does science doesn't do that, they’re not taken seriously by other members of the scientific community. No one is truly believed at face value. I don’t see any significant probability of bamboozling the community of scientists through abject fraud. And there hasn’t been any such issue yet. (There have been retracted published claims, but the retractions happened as a result of scientific scrutiny.)

unixhero 5y ago

All I have to say is ... /THREAD!!!

MichaelZuo 5y ago

That’s a good mentality to have, working on hard things because they are hard. Have there been any major roadblocks that required a change in direction, or at least reevluation of goals?

chobytes 5y ago

Were currently doing lattice calculations for a class im in, using "big cloud company"s quantum computers. That eats qubits quick, so 5000 qubits sounds luxurious! The organizers dont seem to know specifics about D-wave when Ive asked, but do you think these kinds of simulations will ever be able to be run on D-wave hardware?

Yizahi 5y ago

Please clarify one question for me. From other sources I've understood that what we call today quantum computer basically does something random which can't be reasonably reproduced on conventional computers and because of that we declare that this process was quantum computing. But you can't do specific calculations on them - have some input data, some algorithm and receive usable and verifiable result faster than on conventional computer. Is this in general correct or not?

md2020 5y ago

Unrelated to the article, but as a young SWE (finished undergrad in December 2020) who’s always had a side-interest in physics, how do I end up working at a QC company like DWave? Right now I’m working in embedded systems programming at a semiconductor manufacturing equipment company, and I assume at a company like DWave that also makes hardware the possible SW roles are somewhat similar (embedded, metrology, monitoring, algorithms, etc.). Do you look for physics knowledge in your SWE applicants?

mikewave 5y ago
Apply! We have plenty of job openings. Physics and electrical engineering backgrounds are critical for some teams, but for other teams it's not as important. This is a wonderful time to be a younger person in the industry; there are tons of job opportunities and every hiring manager is hungry for talented, dedicated people. That said, we do tend to be hiring for more senior roles, considering the small size of the company. If your goal is to land in QC eventually, make sure to have a really broad skill set, get some experience working on hard projects, and apply every year or so until you find a role in the field. No matter which firm you end up at, it's an exciting industry where you can feel like you're actually helping with a grand human effort to push the state of the art.

omegalulw 5y ago

How close are you to running programs that have exponential speedups with quantum computing? Wouldn't it be trivial to verify that the algorithm ran on real quantum hardware in that case?