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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 not

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 (There have been retracted published claims, but the retractions happened as a result of scientific scrutiny.)
mikewave 5y ago
> If all you can offer is your "personal assurance" then that seems to exactly confirms the author's point. In my post, I literally said: "I would like to know what the article's author would take as proof of this." What, honestly, would it take? I have been thinking about what evidence I personally would want if I were in your position of incredulity. It's different when you sit next to the things and see the people passionately building them and keeping them working day in and day out, I suppose; I can see with my own eyes that there is no fraud taking place, but I can't exactly bring everyone in the world in for a lab tour.
- prof-dr-ir 5y ago
  I am not incredulous and neither, I believe, is the article's author. You are arguing besides the point. This is not about you or D-wave. Instead it is like there is a shop with so little supervision that every customer has to be trusted to not steal things. So if a customer asks: "What can I do to convince the world that I am not stealing?" then the answer is clear: you either show your shopping bag to everyone in the world, or we need an entirely different kind of shop. The point of this part of the article is that, for quantum computing, there is an equivalent structural problem. Until it is absolutely manifest that quantum computers do useful things that classical computers cannot, the potential for fraud remains real.
  - zenron 5y ago
    Couldn't you say the same thing about conventional CPU's and the ability to create RNG's before ERATA show up by the vendor or found by groups doing deep dives on how correct the hardware RNG is? Or any other issue in a mainstream CPU? It isn't like we've not seen bugs show up in hardware and software pertaining to RNGs or other types of math related issues. Why should we not give the same benefit of the doubt to Quantum compute services by credible compute providers? You should know you are in for a 'as correct as we currently understand it' system provided to you. That has been the case for decades. This all reminds me when the Pentium 1 FDIV defect showed up. Today, however, we've abstracted that to compute hosting providers and we have less tech to qualify our results against.
  - 5y ago

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.)

mikewave 5y ago

> If all you can offer is your "personal assurance" then that seems to exactly confirms the author's point. In my post, I literally said: "I would like to know what the article's author would take as proof of this." What, honestly, would it take? I have been thinking about what evidence I personally would want if I were in your position of incredulity. It's different when you sit next to the things and see the people passionately building them and keeping them working day in and day out, I suppose; I can see with my own eyes that there is no fraud taking place, but I can't exactly bring everyone in the world in for a lab tour.

prof-dr-ir 5y ago
I am not incredulous and neither, I believe, is the article's author. You are arguing besides the point. This is not about you or D-wave. Instead it is like there is a shop with so little supervision that every customer has to be trusted to not steal things. So if a customer asks: "What can I do to convince the world that I am not stealing?" then the answer is clear: you either show your shopping bag to everyone in the world, or we need an entirely different kind of shop. The point of this part of the article is that, for quantum computing, there is an equivalent structural problem. Until it is absolutely manifest that quantum computers do useful things that classical computers cannot, the potential for fraud remains real.
- zenron 5y ago
  Couldn't you say the same thing about conventional CPU's and the ability to create RNG's before ERATA show up by the vendor or found by groups doing deep dives on how correct the hardware RNG is? Or any other issue in a mainstream CPU? It isn't like we've not seen bugs show up in hardware and software pertaining to RNGs or other types of math related issues. Why should we not give the same benefit of the doubt to Quantum compute services by credible compute providers? You should know you are in for a 'as correct as we currently understand it' system provided to you. That has been the case for decades. This all reminds me when the Pentium 1 FDIV defect showed up. Today, however, we've abstracted that to compute hosting providers and we have less tech to qualify our results against.
- 5y ago