7 ms·

I studied experimental condensed-matter physics and this article is spot on. The PIs at my university were holding clouds of rubidium atoms with laser tweezers

I studied experimental condensed-matter physics and this article is spot on. The PIs at my university were holding clouds of rubidium atoms with laser tweezers at microkelvins in ultra-high vacuum, agitating them with a laser beam, and publishing papers saying "look it responds sort of like a qubit!" If you have seen the kind of equipment required to perform these experiments, it's absolutely unimaginable that these concepts could be miniaturized enough that someone would be able to put them in a desktop size box, and to do so usefully and safely within a timeline that is competitive with the advancement of microelectronics.

peteradio 4y ago
How much of that size is cryo-equipment though?
- propter_hoc 4y ago
  That's my point; how do you propose to miniaturize cryogenic equipment (and make it safe for the general public to use)? The UHV equipment is pretty intense too, fwiw.
  - peteradio 4y ago
    I'm not sure, I wonder if there are some back of the envelope estimates that could be done to see how small you could theoretically shrink that portion. At least when you make it small the materials cost is minimized!! Could make it out of exotic materials and it might still be cost effective. I wouldn't worry too much about safety once its small, there is minimal amount of harm caused by ultra cold or ultra high vacuum.
    - logifail 4y ago
      > I wouldn't worry too much about safety once its small, there is minimal amount of harm caused by ultra cold or ultra high vacuum In a previous life I worked with NMR machines, the ones with superconducting magnets cooled by liquid helium which is itself cooled by liquid nitrogen. I would dispute "minimal amount of harm", part of the our training involved what to do if the magnet quenches, I recall "run for the exit before you suffocate" was basically the SOP... Anyway, they were loads of fun to work with, I won't ever forget that time I nearly had my house keys snatched out of my hand by one, but back then (25 years ago) they occupied entire rooms. AFAIK they still do. OT but I had an MRI a couple of weeks ago, and forgot to take off my gold wedding band. I could distinctly feel the magnetic field pulsing in my ring as the scan started. After a brief moment of sheer panic I realised it wasn't a problem ... and as I lay there I was idly wondering about just how much gold was in my ring :)
      - peteradio 4y ago
        > I would dispute "minimal amount of harm", part of the our training involved what to do if the magnet quenches, I recall "run for the exit before you suffocate" was basically the SOP... Yes, at current scale it would be very hazardous, but at miniature scale a gram of liquid helium could do how much damage considering it would have to make its way through the internals of a machine to contact skin?
  - JamesianP 4y ago
    I'm pretty skeptical about the whole field myself, but miniaturization would presumably come via some new (disruptive) hardware technology. IC's weren't made by miniaturizing vacuum tubes. Of course (back to skepticism) it's not like no one thought to try using quantum mechanics and history is starting over at the 60's. Modern QC research comes after decades of ideas failing, throughout more recent times where we have been much more technologically knowledgeable versus the early days of computing.
- rich_sasha 4y ago
  I once saw a cut out of a D-wave computer (not a "real" quantum computer but also cryogenic). The whole device is roughly the size of a old school mainframe - a few wardrobes. But it's mostly layers of insulation and cooling. The business bit inside fits in your hand. Or so I remember at least. Actual cooling (stuff that pumps liquid nitrogen and helium) was external to all this.
starkd 4y ago
I think the most realistic goal was always a main-frame type computer that could perform computations for special purposes. Not necessarily to shrink it down to phone-size or even a desktop. But maybe the marketing did really have this objective.
- himinlomax 4y ago
  First thing would be to figure what that special purpose could possibly be. We're not even there yet ...
  - hailwren 4y ago
    For civilian applications, sure. But Shor’s seems like a good enough reason for defense and defense have deep enough pockets to get this somewhat rolling.
  - return_to_monke 4y ago
    The special purpose is figuring out what the special purpose is :)
  - er4hn 4y ago
    My friends in the industry tell me that predicting protein folding is a popular civilian use case.
    - kazinator 4y ago
      Seems like the easiest way to use quantum mechanics to predict how a protein will fold might be to actually build that protein and watch.
      - sivizius 4y ago
        yes, because watching molecules is easy…right?
  - benreesman 4y ago
moralestapia 4y ago
I would argue against QC from a theoretical standpoint (i.e. will the asymptote of EC be enough to beat the asymptote of noise?) not from a technological one, recall that not long ago, a single transistor was a whole experiment on its own and today there's single chips with a trillion (!) of them.
- lupire 4y ago
  The original computers were big because they were mechanical, and they shrunk by being reduced to electric and due to more precise engineering. QC are big because the energy levels are so high that they require complex equipment to focus energy and remove heat, akin to the tyranny of the rocket equation.
- tsimionescu 4y ago
  On the other hand, from the moment the idea of computing was first used as a top secret weapon until it became a commercially available solution was around 10-15 years (in 1936 Turing wrote his thesis on computability, in 1938, the Polish mathematicians researching Enigma built their "Bomba" machines to help with decryption, by 1948 the first working electronic computer was created, the Baby, and by 1951, you had UNIVAC1 which was being sold to corporations). Quantum computing has not advanced anywhere near this fast (because it is a much much harder problem). Past pace of technological advance can't be used to predict future pace in a quite different field.
  - galaxyLogic 4y ago
    Right, think of fission fast progress but fusion very slow progress. Fission and fusion are very much about the same thing so they should be as easy right? But they're not.
    - empiricus 4y ago
      Fission is just putting two rocks together, and you get energy. Fusion is a little more complicated in practice.
  - 4y ago
serverholic 4y ago
I can't help but think capitalism plays a part in encouraging this kind of pathological behavior.
daniel-cussen 4y ago
Gotta admit the transistorization of the computer and the exponential decay of size required for the transistor, and exponential decay in duration of the transistor to FO4 (switch states, it's much less than the clock cycle) was beautiful while it lasted. Like now it's back to the drawing board. . Same as airplanes, basically the same since 1960, like we fly on Super Fortresses with the bomb bays replaced with cargo holds...like different dispenser, and the plexiglass fishbowl artillery in the front done differently. I would love to be in one of those fishbowls, like all exposed flying at the horizon like panoramic view. So suicidal, like all aviation. Like not getting shot at like in Catch-22 though. Hopefully.
- bhelkey 4y ago
  > Same as airplanes, basically the same since 1960, like we fly on Super Fortresses with the bomb bays replaced with cargo holds Nit picking, the B-29 Superfortress was a propeller driven aircraft [1]. Modern commercial planes generally have jet engines. Jet engines represent a leap forwards in aerospace engineering. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_B-29_Superfortress https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_B-29_Superfortress
zitterbewegung 4y ago
We see a similar thing with Ai / ML where there is a huge amount of hype but applications of quantum computation are only restricted to searching an unstructured database, finding prime factors of a number , solving a linear system of equations , computing knot invariants and the obvious one which is quantum simulation. [1] It would be better just exposing this as a library of functions and then hooking it up to a cloud service to solve. Which Amazon, Microsoft and IBM have. Microsoft and IBM are using their own hardware And Amazon is reselling other providers. [2,3,4,5] Researching post quantum cryptography algorithms are already on their way [7] but most likely feasible quantum computers are 80 years away when I was reading a great deal of quantum algorithm papers as a class and I asked the professor how long it would take. The interesting strategy if you were to hack a organization which has encrypted backups would be to exfiltrate the backups and then wait for a quantum computer that could break it which is why post quantum encryption needs to be researched but the algorithms involved are still in their early stages. Post [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_algorithm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_algorithm [2] https://quantumai.google/hardware https://quantumai.google/hardware [3] https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/solutions/quantum-computing/ https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/solutions/quantum-computin... [4] https://aws.amazon.com/braket/ https://aws.amazon.com/braket/ [5] https://www.ibm.com/quantum https://www.ibm.com/quantum [6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-quantum_cryptography?wprov=sfti1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-quantum_cryptography?wpro... [7] https://pqcrypto.org/conferences.html https://pqcrypto.org/conferences.html
- mirekrusin 4y ago
  State of quantum computing is much worse than AI/ML. AI/ML easily demonstrates superiority - from playing games, classification, translation, generative art etc. QC is stuck at no practical use with claims that it'll stay this way for decades, some claiming forever as there may be physical walls that can't be broken.
  - zitterbewegung 4y ago
    Totally agree should have played that much more up in my comment.
- 4y ago
JBits 4y ago
The scalability of quantum computing tech is a major concern but no one is claiming that it'll be miniaturize to that extent nor that this is even a goal.
- boltzmann-brain 4y ago
  If computational tech cannot be miniaturized then it is dead, as only at massive production quotas does the technology become useful enough to become inexpensive. This is exactly what happened with normal (non quantum) computers. Imagine if computers were still the size of a room... Terrifying thought
  - JBits 4y ago
    You're right that it does need to be miniturized to some extent but there's absolutely no need for it to be desktop sized. If in the future a quantum computer is built, taking up multiple rooms is not an issue at all. The value is in a quantum computer existing at all, not it's availablity to consumers.
  - heavyset_go 4y ago
    Miniaturization really kicked up because we needed to shoot computers into orbit and minimizing mass was a crucial optimization for that problem. Might see a similar bout of miniaturization if we can come up with a good defensive/offensive application for putting quantum computers in orbit.
zh3 4y ago
I've actually pushed rubidium ions around in UQ's setup, and a bunch of us had a tour and Q&A with the founder. It's incredibly detailed stuff (insane optical tables, and weeks tracking down a stray hair that was contanimating the high vacuum system). I'm still on the sceptical side, but some of the tricks they use to move things with atomic-level precision make it hard to imagine there won't be something useful coming out of it. Whether it will ever justify the investment is, of course, another question.
packetlost 4y ago
There's a bunch of different modalities that have varying possibilities of being miniaturized, but neutral atom is probably the hardest (that I'm aware of). It's important to remember that basically no one who takes QC seriously thinks we're going to have quantum in smartphone-sized devices any time soon. It's really better to think of them as specialized co-processors than as general purpose computational units, of which we're more in the "mainframe" era than the "smartphone" era. > "look it responds sort of like a qubit!" And behave like them too ;)

peteradio 4y ago

How much of that size is cryo-equipment though?

propter_hoc 4y ago
That's my point; how do you propose to miniaturize cryogenic equipment (and make it safe for the general public to use)? The UHV equipment is pretty intense too, fwiw.
- peteradio 4y ago
  I'm not sure, I wonder if there are some back of the envelope estimates that could be done to see how small you could theoretically shrink that portion. At least when you make it small the materials cost is minimized!! Could make it out of exotic materials and it might still be cost effective. I wouldn't worry too much about safety once its small, there is minimal amount of harm caused by ultra cold or ultra high vacuum.
  - logifail 4y ago
    > I wouldn't worry too much about safety once its small, there is minimal amount of harm caused by ultra cold or ultra high vacuum In a previous life I worked with NMR machines, the ones with superconducting magnets cooled by liquid helium which is itself cooled by liquid nitrogen. I would dispute "minimal amount of harm", part of the our training involved what to do if the magnet quenches, I recall "run for the exit before you suffocate" was basically the SOP... Anyway, they were loads of fun to work with, I won't ever forget that time I nearly had my house keys snatched out of my hand by one, but back then (25 years ago) they occupied entire rooms. AFAIK they still do. OT but I had an MRI a couple of weeks ago, and forgot to take off my gold wedding band. I could distinctly feel the magnetic field pulsing in my ring as the scan started. After a brief moment of sheer panic I realised it wasn't a problem ... and as I lay there I was idly wondering about just how much gold was in my ring :)
    - peteradio 4y ago
      > I would dispute "minimal amount of harm", part of the our training involved what to do if the magnet quenches, I recall "run for the exit before you suffocate" was basically the SOP... Yes, at current scale it would be very hazardous, but at miniature scale a gram of liquid helium could do how much damage considering it would have to make its way through the internals of a machine to contact skin?
- JamesianP 4y ago
  I'm pretty skeptical about the whole field myself, but miniaturization would presumably come via some new (disruptive) hardware technology. IC's weren't made by miniaturizing vacuum tubes. Of course (back to skepticism) it's not like no one thought to try using quantum mechanics and history is starting over at the 60's. Modern QC research comes after decades of ideas failing, throughout more recent times where we have been much more technologically knowledgeable versus the early days of computing.
rich_sasha 4y ago
I once saw a cut out of a D-wave computer (not a "real" quantum computer but also cryogenic). The whole device is roughly the size of a old school mainframe - a few wardrobes. But it's mostly layers of insulation and cooling. The business bit inside fits in your hand. Or so I remember at least. Actual cooling (stuff that pumps liquid nitrogen and helium) was external to all this.

starkd 4y ago

I think the most realistic goal was always a main-frame type computer that could perform computations for special purposes. Not necessarily to shrink it down to phone-size or even a desktop. But maybe the marketing did really have this objective.

himinlomax 4y ago
First thing would be to figure what that special purpose could possibly be. We're not even there yet ...
- hailwren 4y ago
  For civilian applications, sure. But Shor’s seems like a good enough reason for defense and defense have deep enough pockets to get this somewhat rolling.
- return_to_monke 4y ago
  The special purpose is figuring out what the special purpose is :)
- er4hn 4y ago
  My friends in the industry tell me that predicting protein folding is a popular civilian use case.
  - kazinator 4y ago
    Seems like the easiest way to use quantum mechanics to predict how a protein will fold might be to actually build that protein and watch.
    - sivizius 4y ago
      yes, because watching molecules is easy…right?
- benreesman 4y ago

moralestapia 4y ago

I would argue against QC from a theoretical standpoint (i.e. will the asymptote of EC be enough to beat the asymptote of noise?) not from a technological one, recall that not long ago, a single transistor was a whole experiment on its own and today there's single chips with a trillion (!) of them.

lupire 4y ago
The original computers were big because they were mechanical, and they shrunk by being reduced to electric and due to more precise engineering. QC are big because the energy levels are so high that they require complex equipment to focus energy and remove heat, akin to the tyranny of the rocket equation.
tsimionescu 4y ago
On the other hand, from the moment the idea of computing was first used as a top secret weapon until it became a commercially available solution was around 10-15 years (in 1936 Turing wrote his thesis on computability, in 1938, the Polish mathematicians researching Enigma built their "Bomba" machines to help with decryption, by 1948 the first working electronic computer was created, the Baby, and by 1951, you had UNIVAC1 which was being sold to corporations). Quantum computing has not advanced anywhere near this fast (because it is a much much harder problem). Past pace of technological advance can't be used to predict future pace in a quite different field.
- galaxyLogic 4y ago
  Right, think of fission fast progress but fusion very slow progress. Fission and fusion are very much about the same thing so they should be as easy right? But they're not.
  - empiricus 4y ago
    Fission is just putting two rocks together, and you get energy. Fusion is a little more complicated in practice.
- 4y ago

serverholic 4y ago

I can't help but think capitalism plays a part in encouraging this kind of pathological behavior.

daniel-cussen 4y ago

Gotta admit the transistorization of the computer and the exponential decay of size required for the transistor, and exponential decay in duration of the transistor to FO4 (switch states, it's much less than the clock cycle) was beautiful while it lasted. Like now it's back to the drawing board. . Same as airplanes, basically the same since 1960, like we fly on Super Fortresses with the bomb bays replaced with cargo holds...like different dispenser, and the plexiglass fishbowl artillery in the front done differently. I would love to be in one of those fishbowls, like all exposed flying at the horizon like panoramic view. So suicidal, like all aviation. Like not getting shot at like in Catch-22 though. Hopefully.

bhelkey 4y ago
> Same as airplanes, basically the same since 1960, like we fly on Super Fortresses with the bomb bays replaced with cargo holds Nit picking, the B-29 Superfortress was a propeller driven aircraft [1]. Modern commercial planes generally have jet engines. Jet engines represent a leap forwards in aerospace engineering. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_B-29_Superfortress https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_B-29_Superfortress

zitterbewegung 4y ago

We see a similar thing with Ai / ML where there is a huge amount of hype but applications of quantum computation are only restricted to searching an unstructured database, finding prime factors of a number , solving a linear system of equations , computing knot invariants and the obvious one which is quantum simulation. [1] It would be better just exposing this as a library of functions and then hooking it up to a cloud service to solve. Which Amazon, Microsoft and IBM have. Microsoft and IBM are using their own hardware And Amazon is reselling other providers. [2,3,4,5] Researching post quantum cryptography algorithms are already on their way [7] but most likely feasible quantum computers are 80 years away when I was reading a great deal of quantum algorithm papers as a class and I asked the professor how long it would take. The interesting strategy if you were to hack a organization which has encrypted backups would be to exfiltrate the backups and then wait for a quantum computer that could break it which is why post quantum encryption needs to be researched but the algorithms involved are still in their early stages. Post [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_algorithm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_algorithm [2] https://quantumai.google/hardware https://quantumai.google/hardware [3] https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/solutions/quantum-computing/ https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/solutions/quantum-computin... [4] https://aws.amazon.com/braket/ https://aws.amazon.com/braket/ [5] https://www.ibm.com/quantum https://www.ibm.com/quantum [6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-quantum_cryptography?wprov=sfti1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-quantum_cryptography?wpro... [7] https://pqcrypto.org/conferences.html https://pqcrypto.org/conferences.html

mirekrusin 4y ago
State of quantum computing is much worse than AI/ML. AI/ML easily demonstrates superiority - from playing games, classification, translation, generative art etc. QC is stuck at no practical use with claims that it'll stay this way for decades, some claiming forever as there may be physical walls that can't be broken.
- zitterbewegung 4y ago
  Totally agree should have played that much more up in my comment.
4y ago

JBits 4y ago

The scalability of quantum computing tech is a major concern but no one is claiming that it'll be miniaturize to that extent nor that this is even a goal.

boltzmann-brain 4y ago
If computational tech cannot be miniaturized then it is dead, as only at massive production quotas does the technology become useful enough to become inexpensive. This is exactly what happened with normal (non quantum) computers. Imagine if computers were still the size of a room... Terrifying thought
- JBits 4y ago
  You're right that it does need to be miniturized to some extent but there's absolutely no need for it to be desktop sized. If in the future a quantum computer is built, taking up multiple rooms is not an issue at all. The value is in a quantum computer existing at all, not it's availablity to consumers.
- heavyset_go 4y ago
  Miniaturization really kicked up because we needed to shoot computers into orbit and minimizing mass was a crucial optimization for that problem. Might see a similar bout of miniaturization if we can come up with a good defensive/offensive application for putting quantum computers in orbit.

zh3 4y ago

I've actually pushed rubidium ions around in UQ's setup, and a bunch of us had a tour and Q&A with the founder. It's incredibly detailed stuff (insane optical tables, and weeks tracking down a stray hair that was contanimating the high vacuum system). I'm still on the sceptical side, but some of the tricks they use to move things with atomic-level precision make it hard to imagine there won't be something useful coming out of it. Whether it will ever justify the investment is, of course, another question.

packetlost 4y ago

There's a bunch of different modalities that have varying possibilities of being miniaturized, but neutral atom is probably the hardest (that I'm aware of). It's important to remember that basically no one who takes QC seriously thinks we're going to have quantum in smartphone-sized devices any time soon. It's really better to think of them as specialized co-processors than as general purpose computational units, of which we're more in the "mainframe" era than the "smartphone" era. > "look it responds sort of like a qubit!" And behave like them too ;)