6 ms·

The quantum technology ecosystem explained

70 points by sblank 5y ago

westurner 5y ago
Wikipedia (dbpedia, wikidata,) concept URIs: Category:Quantum mechanics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Quantum_mechanics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Quantum_mechanics Applications_of_quantum_mechanics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Applications_of_quantum_mechanics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Applications_of_quantum_mechan... List of emerging technologies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_emerging_technologies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_emerging_technologies may have inspiration for applications of currently-discovered quantum mechanical phenomena. #Q12 is the Quantum K12 talent. QoS: Quantum-on-Silicon may very well scale; but how can we store un-collapsed output qubits? Quantum tagging,
- zardo 5y ago
  > QoS: Quantum-on-Silicon may very well scale; but how can we store un-collapsed output qubits? Aren't all current programmable quantum processors essentially made of qubit memory cells capable of certain in-memory operations?
  - NohatCoder 5y ago
    All current programmable quantum processors are made from unicorn hairs and fairy dust. The current state of the art is trying to prove that the thing did something quantum. Programmability is at best swapping some wires around to change that something.
    - Strilanc 5y ago
      Programming current quantum computers does not require swapping wires around. You can go to https://quantum-computing.ibm.com https://quantum-computing.ibm.com right now, drag some operations around in an editor, and have their quantum computer run those operations. No one is madly dashing around changing wires when you do that.
      - westurner 5y ago
        That was how they did it back in the old days though. Q: "Ask HN: What's the Equivalent of 'Hello, World' for a Quantum Computer?" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22707580 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22707580 [ IBM Qiskit, Microsoft Q#, Google TFQ TensorFlow Quantum, Google Cirq ([NumFOCUS,] SymPy) ] - https://www.tensorflow.org/quantum/tutorials/hello_many_worlds https://www.tensorflow.org/quantum/tutorials/hello_many_worl... A: Set a register to zero and see how many times it reads as zero: A) in the local software simulator; and B) with just one modern day qubit register.
      - NohatCoder 5y ago
        All the offered "quantum computers" are suspiciously easily simulated on a normal PC.
        klyrs 5y ago
        Not if you try to simulate the actual device under test, and not an idealized version of what it isn't. Nothing suspicious about it, they're small and noisy. Scalability is extremely hard for quantum computers, and there's distinct tradeoffs that need to be made in their engineering. As far as I know, nobody in the industry is making absurd claims about their current offerings. That said, some claims of projected growth I've seen appear to be batshit. And, I believe that you're wrong: Google's quantum supremacy result appears to be genuine, and IBM's refutation was, essentially, "we can use a ginormous supercomputer to match that" -- not your ordinary desktop.
        reikonomusha 5y ago
        46 qubits of a perfectly ideal quantum computer require a petabyte of RAM to simulate, and about 10 quadrillion—if not more—arithmetic instructions to perform a single quantum instruction.
    - reikonomusha 5y ago
      This is false. Quantum computers are not programmed like telephone switch boards. They're programmed typically by sending signal pulses (of RF, DC, or light) of the right shape at the right time to physical elements and they react. It really is programming. Moreover, it's remarkably easy to see that the machines—universal gate-based machines—are doing something quantum. What's not easy to see is if they'll ever break away from their scaling challenges and become useful, large scale machines.
      - dekhn 5y ago
        Well, NMR has been doing that for quite some time but nobody considers it "computing". Realistically, you're encoding a problem within a physical system by perturbing its energy levels, letting them evolve, and then doing readout. This works because computation is universal.
        reikonomusha 5y ago
        Again, no. Maybe you're thinking about adiabatic quantum computation, something popularized by D-Wave. But most people in the industry don't call their machines "(universal) computers," but rather "quantum annealers." This is not the same as universal, gate-based computation, which does take an actual program containing instructions, and executes those instructions more-or-less sequentially, just as any computer programmer would expect. The state of the system begins with what is essentially equivalent to a large array of 0's, and you manipulate it accordingly, without resorting to evolution as your primary computational means of marching forward. In fact, left alone, these computers are designed to remain static, like an ordinary computer. (However, they still couple with the environment and decohere, which is one of the major challenges we, as humanity, face in building a useful quantum computer.) This is what Rigetti, IBM, Google, HRL, Amazon, IonQ, ColdQuanta, etc. are doing. They use superconducting transmon qubits, ion qubits, neutral atom qubits, or silicon quantum dot qubits. (There are other companies and qubit technologies still.)
        dekhn 5y ago
        Hey, um, I think I do know what I'm talking about :). You can see more of this historical side effort, which didn't pan out for a number of reasons: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_magnetic_resonance_quantum_computer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_magnetic_resonance_qua... A 7 qubit QC NMR was implemented in 2001. All these systems are just evolution of spin systems or other similar systems. The big difference with an NMR quantum computer is that it manipulates ensembles of spins. The comment about universality of computing is that many physical processes can be used to compute things. I didn't say that qcs were universal computers. Please try to read what i'm writing more carefully.
_sword 5y ago
All of the QC companies have “gone public” via SPAC mergers. Less oversight, more hockey stick revenue projections.
- ziofill 5y ago
  not all of them
  - latenightcoding 5y ago
    all of them. IonQ, Rigetti, D-Wave.
- reikonomusha 5y ago
  HRL Laboratories is very active in the field (if you happened to catch them at APS March Meeting) and hasn't been public since their founding in the 60s. It's one of the most respected private research laboratories of the United States. (It's currently jointly owned by Boeing and General Motors, but enjoys decision-making autonomy.)
- kvathupo 5y ago
  Frankly, they had no other choice: public funding for quantum computing research is unacceptably low in the US. While China is funneling $10B into a single quantum lab [1], the US only spent $800M in the whole area for 2021 [2]. I fear that we're repeating the same mistake we made with Machine Learning funding. A decade ago, the US was quite clearly ahead of China in machine learning, but they're comparable now. In quantum information science, the US is currently ahead of China in terms of research. But will it remain that way? For more information, here's a panel discussion on the quantum computing race between China and the US (I was quite frustrated by it): https://youtu.be/KzFEeQ49HHI https://youtu.be/KzFEeQ49HHI [1] - https://english.ckgsb.edu.cn/knowledges/quantum-wars/ https://english.ckgsb.edu.cn/knowledges/quantum-wars/ [2] - https://quantumcomputingreport.com/u-s-qis-budget-proposed-to-grow-10-6-to-877-million-in-fy2022/ https://quantumcomputingreport.com/u-s-qis-budget-proposed-t...
NohatCoder 5y ago
The article mention that NSA have objected to quantum key distribution, then go on to state: However, if you’re a commercial company these systems may be worth exploring. The problem that NSA and many others have pointed out is that it doesn't solve any actual problems. It creates a bunch of hassles but can't replace asymmetric cryptography.
- grobclaw 5y ago
  Correctly implemented QKD gives you key distribution without assumptions about how difficult certain mathematical problems are in relation to how much compute your adversary has. Key distribution is nowadays done with assymetric cryptography, so QKD can replace some assymmetric cryptography. You can also have authentication (Wegman-Carter) with symmetric keys. What's not quite clear is how you would do certificates and PKI. However, given key distribution, you could probably use symmetric keys for that as well. It's unlikely that your adversaries can decrypt your traffic right now (break things like RSA). However, advances in number theory and/or computing power might enable them to do that in the future. Your adversary can just record your encrypted traffic and wait until the means to decrypt it become available. Thus, for data that has to stay secure for a long time (and where you want to be as sure as possible that it will) it's not good to rely on predictions into the future about advances in number theory or computing. This is the niche that QKD is aiming at. For what it's worth, China has a huge QKD network, which cost them a lot of money. Their QKD satellite also cost a lot of money. They are in fact world leaders in quantum communication technology as well and spend a lot on researching it. I wonder why they made this investment, whether it was smart, and what they get out of it. I also have doubts that QKD will see much use in the coming decades and even more doubts that its use will be done properly and actually make a lot of systems more secure. Securing systems is very hard and securing individual communication links (what QKD does) is not the main problem. In the current landscape, securing your data and communications to a reasonable level just isn't worth it for the vast majority of buisnesses, since they can offload most of the damages of being breached to their customers. There is a danger that QKD will be seen as "magic fairy dust" that you sprinkle over your systems just to claim you're trying very hard to secure them (this image is still widespread about standard cryptography as well).
bashmelek 5y ago
For anyone interested, IBM quantum experience lets you simulate quantum computer operation, and even gives an allowance of running actual simple programs, made in their visual tool “composer”, on a real quantum device, through the api. Signup required for some things. https://quantum-computing.ibm.com/composer/files/new https://quantum-computing.ibm.com/composer/files/new
- mikewave 5y ago
  You can also sign up for D-Wave Leap and use our online IDE, problem visualizer, and submit problems to our QPUs with a free signup. https://cloud.dwavesys.com/leap/ https://cloud.dwavesys.com/leap/
  - plaguepilled 5y ago
    This is somewhat frustrating. I think everyone is interested in alternatives to IBM's offering, but putting it behind account sign-up makes it hostile to 'just checking it out'. I believe this is also why IBM allow some of their features to be accessed without an account. Please remove the account requirement if possible. I will happily check it out once the account requirement is removed.
kaicode2 5y ago
Quantum imaging was an application I was not aware of until reading this. Tremendously exciting. Great post.

70 points by sblank 5y ago

Wikipedia (dbpedia, wikidata,) concept URIs: Category:Quantum mechanics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Quantum_mechanics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Quantum_mechanics Applications_of_quantum_mechanics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Applications_of_quantum_mechanics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Applications_of_quantum_mechan... List of emerging technologies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_emerging_technologies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_emerging_technologies may have inspiration for applications of currently-discovered quantum mechanical phenomena. #Q12 is the Quantum K12 talent. QoS: Quantum-on-Silicon may very well scale; but how can we store un-collapsed output qubits? Quantum tagging,

zardo 5y ago
> QoS: Quantum-on-Silicon may very well scale; but how can we store un-collapsed output qubits? Aren't all current programmable quantum processors essentially made of qubit memory cells capable of certain in-memory operations?
- NohatCoder 5y ago
  All current programmable quantum processors are made from unicorn hairs and fairy dust. The current state of the art is trying to prove that the thing did something quantum. Programmability is at best swapping some wires around to change that something.
  - Strilanc 5y ago
    Programming current quantum computers does not require swapping wires around. You can go to https://quantum-computing.ibm.com https://quantum-computing.ibm.com right now, drag some operations around in an editor, and have their quantum computer run those operations. No one is madly dashing around changing wires when you do that.
    - westurner 5y ago
      That was how they did it back in the old days though. Q: "Ask HN: What's the Equivalent of 'Hello, World' for a Quantum Computer?" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22707580 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22707580 [ IBM Qiskit, Microsoft Q#, Google TFQ TensorFlow Quantum, Google Cirq ([NumFOCUS,] SymPy) ] - https://www.tensorflow.org/quantum/tutorials/hello_many_worlds https://www.tensorflow.org/quantum/tutorials/hello_many_worl... A: Set a register to zero and see how many times it reads as zero: A) in the local software simulator; and B) with just one modern day qubit register.
    - NohatCoder 5y ago
      All the offered "quantum computers" are suspiciously easily simulated on a normal PC.
      - klyrs 5y ago
        Not if you try to simulate the actual device under test, and not an idealized version of what it isn't. Nothing suspicious about it, they're small and noisy. Scalability is extremely hard for quantum computers, and there's distinct tradeoffs that need to be made in their engineering. As far as I know, nobody in the industry is making absurd claims about their current offerings. That said, some claims of projected growth I've seen appear to be batshit. And, I believe that you're wrong: Google's quantum supremacy result appears to be genuine, and IBM's refutation was, essentially, "we can use a ginormous supercomputer to match that" -- not your ordinary desktop.
      - reikonomusha 5y ago
        46 qubits of a perfectly ideal quantum computer require a petabyte of RAM to simulate, and about 10 quadrillion—if not more—arithmetic instructions to perform a single quantum instruction.
  - reikonomusha 5y ago
    This is false. Quantum computers are not programmed like telephone switch boards. They're programmed typically by sending signal pulses (of RF, DC, or light) of the right shape at the right time to physical elements and they react. It really is programming. Moreover, it's remarkably easy to see that the machines—universal gate-based machines—are doing something quantum. What's not easy to see is if they'll ever break away from their scaling challenges and become useful, large scale machines.
    - dekhn 5y ago
      Well, NMR has been doing that for quite some time but nobody considers it "computing". Realistically, you're encoding a problem within a physical system by perturbing its energy levels, letting them evolve, and then doing readout. This works because computation is universal.
      - reikonomusha 5y ago
        Again, no. Maybe you're thinking about adiabatic quantum computation, something popularized by D-Wave. But most people in the industry don't call their machines "(universal) computers," but rather "quantum annealers." This is not the same as universal, gate-based computation, which does take an actual program containing instructions, and executes those instructions more-or-less sequentially, just as any computer programmer would expect. The state of the system begins with what is essentially equivalent to a large array of 0's, and you manipulate it accordingly, without resorting to evolution as your primary computational means of marching forward. In fact, left alone, these computers are designed to remain static, like an ordinary computer. (However, they still couple with the environment and decohere, which is one of the major challenges we, as humanity, face in building a useful quantum computer.) This is what Rigetti, IBM, Google, HRL, Amazon, IonQ, ColdQuanta, etc. are doing. They use superconducting transmon qubits, ion qubits, neutral atom qubits, or silicon quantum dot qubits. (There are other companies and qubit technologies still.)
        dekhn 5y ago
        Hey, um, I think I do know what I'm talking about :). You can see more of this historical side effort, which didn't pan out for a number of reasons: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_magnetic_resonance_quantum_computer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_magnetic_resonance_qua... A 7 qubit QC NMR was implemented in 2001. All these systems are just evolution of spin systems or other similar systems. The big difference with an NMR quantum computer is that it manipulates ensembles of spins. The comment about universality of computing is that many physical processes can be used to compute things. I didn't say that qcs were universal computers. Please try to read what i'm writing more carefully.

_sword 5y ago

All of the QC companies have “gone public” via SPAC mergers. Less oversight, more hockey stick revenue projections.

ziofill 5y ago
not all of them
- latenightcoding 5y ago
  all of them. IonQ, Rigetti, D-Wave.
reikonomusha 5y ago
HRL Laboratories is very active in the field (if you happened to catch them at APS March Meeting) and hasn't been public since their founding in the 60s. It's one of the most respected private research laboratories of the United States. (It's currently jointly owned by Boeing and General Motors, but enjoys decision-making autonomy.)
kvathupo 5y ago
Frankly, they had no other choice: public funding for quantum computing research is unacceptably low in the US. While China is funneling $10B into a single quantum lab [1], the US only spent $800M in the whole area for 2021 [2]. I fear that we're repeating the same mistake we made with Machine Learning funding. A decade ago, the US was quite clearly ahead of China in machine learning, but they're comparable now. In quantum information science, the US is currently ahead of China in terms of research. But will it remain that way? For more information, here's a panel discussion on the quantum computing race between China and the US (I was quite frustrated by it): https://youtu.be/KzFEeQ49HHI https://youtu.be/KzFEeQ49HHI [1] - https://english.ckgsb.edu.cn/knowledges/quantum-wars/ https://english.ckgsb.edu.cn/knowledges/quantum-wars/ [2] - https://quantumcomputingreport.com/u-s-qis-budget-proposed-to-grow-10-6-to-877-million-in-fy2022/ https://quantumcomputingreport.com/u-s-qis-budget-proposed-t...

NohatCoder 5y ago

The article mention that NSA have objected to quantum key distribution, then go on to state: However, if you’re a commercial company these systems may be worth exploring. The problem that NSA and many others have pointed out is that it doesn't solve any actual problems. It creates a bunch of hassles but can't replace asymmetric cryptography.

grobclaw 5y ago
Correctly implemented QKD gives you key distribution without assumptions about how difficult certain mathematical problems are in relation to how much compute your adversary has. Key distribution is nowadays done with assymetric cryptography, so QKD can replace some assymmetric cryptography. You can also have authentication (Wegman-Carter) with symmetric keys. What's not quite clear is how you would do certificates and PKI. However, given key distribution, you could probably use symmetric keys for that as well. It's unlikely that your adversaries can decrypt your traffic right now (break things like RSA). However, advances in number theory and/or computing power might enable them to do that in the future. Your adversary can just record your encrypted traffic and wait until the means to decrypt it become available. Thus, for data that has to stay secure for a long time (and where you want to be as sure as possible that it will) it's not good to rely on predictions into the future about advances in number theory or computing. This is the niche that QKD is aiming at. For what it's worth, China has a huge QKD network, which cost them a lot of money. Their QKD satellite also cost a lot of money. They are in fact world leaders in quantum communication technology as well and spend a lot on researching it. I wonder why they made this investment, whether it was smart, and what they get out of it. I also have doubts that QKD will see much use in the coming decades and even more doubts that its use will be done properly and actually make a lot of systems more secure. Securing systems is very hard and securing individual communication links (what QKD does) is not the main problem. In the current landscape, securing your data and communications to a reasonable level just isn't worth it for the vast majority of buisnesses, since they can offload most of the damages of being breached to their customers. There is a danger that QKD will be seen as "magic fairy dust" that you sprinkle over your systems just to claim you're trying very hard to secure them (this image is still widespread about standard cryptography as well).

bashmelek 5y ago

For anyone interested, IBM quantum experience lets you simulate quantum computer operation, and even gives an allowance of running actual simple programs, made in their visual tool “composer”, on a real quantum device, through the api. Signup required for some things. https://quantum-computing.ibm.com/composer/files/new https://quantum-computing.ibm.com/composer/files/new

mikewave 5y ago
You can also sign up for D-Wave Leap and use our online IDE, problem visualizer, and submit problems to our QPUs with a free signup. https://cloud.dwavesys.com/leap/ https://cloud.dwavesys.com/leap/
- plaguepilled 5y ago
  This is somewhat frustrating. I think everyone is interested in alternatives to IBM's offering, but putting it behind account sign-up makes it hostile to 'just checking it out'. I believe this is also why IBM allow some of their features to be accessed without an account. Please remove the account requirement if possible. I will happily check it out once the account requirement is removed.

kaicode2 5y ago

Quantum imaging was an application I was not aware of until reading this. Tremendously exciting. Great post.