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What real problems have quantum computers solved? I would assume they can solve suitably trivial examples with their limited capability in a way that is demonst

What real problems have quantum computers solved? I would assume they can solve suitably trivial examples with their limited capability in a way that is demonstrably superior to traditional computing.

hannob 3y ago
None. We're in the stage of early research, still trying to figure out how practical it is to build useful QCs at all. Anyone claiming otherwise is trying to fool people. Maybe QCs will have useful applications in the future. Maybe not. If so, then it's decades away.
sghiassy 3y ago
When Voltaire was experimenting with electricity, no one could ever imagine what electricity was good for
- jjgreen 3y ago
  ... and when Becher was experimenting with phlogiston, no-one knew where that would lead.
  - JustifyContent 3y ago
    Lol at comparing demonstrable advanced technology like quantum computing to phlogiston. Anyway, experiments to prove/disprove phlogiston lead directly to our understanding of combustion and discovery of oxygen...
    - jjgreen 3y ago
      I think you rather miss the point, when electricity was postulated, no-one would know where it would lead, I point out that the same is true for phlogiston; one changed the world and the other went nowhere. My point is that just because something has so-far not been shown to be useful does not imply that it will eventually change the world.
- dave333 3y ago
  Interesting that electricity has been useful in bringing about things Voltaire championed such as freedom of speech, and abolition of (slave) labor. However I think you meant Volta the inventor of the battery. Also QC seems to suffer from the opposite of lack of imagination about what it might be good for.
- riffraff 3y ago
  > Voltaire I suspect you mean Volta[0], tho I did wonder if Voltaire[1] worked with electricity :) [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alessandro_Volta https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alessandro_Volta [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voltaire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voltaire
jairuhme 3y ago
I sat in on a seminar with the Cleveland Clinic and IBM as they have a partnership around quantum, and one of the big problems they were working on was using it to speed up drug discovery. I don't recall if they have solved problems completely yet, but it has sped up the discovery process by orders of magnitude.
- mechagodzilla 3y ago
  Nothing involving quantum computing has sped up the 'drug discovery' process by orders of magnitude. At best it has 'accelerated' some toy QM problem that is likely a dozen steps removed from anything you could call drug discovery. I'd love to be proven wrong, but I've yet to see any non-trivial computational chemistry work done on quantum computers.
hackandthink 3y ago
21 was factored into 3 and 7 You have to start somewhere.
- deng 3y ago
  Please also note that they did not run Shor's algorithm to compute this. They had to greatly simplify the algorithm, so that it works specifically for the number '21'.
  - jjgreen 3y ago
    For details on this, see the first answer in https://crypto.stackexchange.com/questions/59795/ https://crypto.stackexchange.com/questions/59795/
StackOverlord 3y ago
Quantinuum is already tackling NLP question-answering tasks, it runs on quantum hardware. The quantum categorial crowd is adamant they'll surpass ChatGPT (the big promise iirc is that it will scale linearly with context length, GPT scales quadratically). For instance see this tweet by Quantinuum head of research and this burgeoning field's main rock: https://twitter.com/coecke/status/1655695990739927040?s=20 https://twitter.com/coecke/status/1655695990739927040?s=20 Coecke went from supervising dozen of thesis at Oxford Quantum (logic) Group to preparing summer camps for high school pupils this year. It's also taking off socially/academically, and observing the field evolving we might have a quantum equivalent of ChatGPT before or at the same time we get implementations of Shor's algorithm (source: my own intuition). See this for instance: https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.11523 https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.11523
- cgranade 3y ago
  The problem you'll run into for any application of quantum computing to large language models is that quantum computers just aren't very good at big data applications. There's two reasons for that: - Current devices, as well as devices likely to be built in the near- to medium-term are quite limited in the number of qubits that they implement. The current record for the most fault-tolerant qubits in a single device is 1. That's a hell of a lot better than where the field was at a couple years ago, but it's far from the huge amount of data that needs to be processed for LLM training and evaluation. - Even if you have enough qubits to store training data, looking them up on a quantum device is still challenging due to what's sometimes called the qRAM problem. It's not trivial to make a quantum oracle that returns the data stored at a given index, and it's still an area of ongoing research to figure out how to do that. That's part of why you see quantum algorithms being developed less for big data tasks and more for big compute tasks like chemistry. There, the program might be very large, but size of the input that has to be stored within the quantum devices and the size of the output you measure back out are both quite small, even down to a single floating-point number in some cases. (source: I've worked in quantum computing for about twenty years now.)
  - pmoriarty 3y ago
    "The current record for the most fault-tolerant qubits in a single device is 1." Can you comment on Google's[1] and IBM's[2] announcements of 70 and 433 qubit quantum computers? Is this just marketing hype? Are the qubits not fault tolerant? Is fault tolerance really necessary to get useful results? [1] - https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2023/07/02/google-quantum-computer-breakthrough-instant-calculations/ https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2023/07/02/google-quant... [2] - https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/05/25/1073606/ibm-wants-to-build-a-100000-qubit-quantum-computer/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/05/25/1073606/ibm-want...

hannob 3y ago

None. We're in the stage of early research, still trying to figure out how practical it is to build useful QCs at all. Anyone claiming otherwise is trying to fool people. Maybe QCs will have useful applications in the future. Maybe not. If so, then it's decades away.

sghiassy 3y ago

When Voltaire was experimenting with electricity, no one could ever imagine what electricity was good for

jjgreen 3y ago
... and when Becher was experimenting with phlogiston, no-one knew where that would lead.
- JustifyContent 3y ago
  Lol at comparing demonstrable advanced technology like quantum computing to phlogiston. Anyway, experiments to prove/disprove phlogiston lead directly to our understanding of combustion and discovery of oxygen...
  - jjgreen 3y ago
    I think you rather miss the point, when electricity was postulated, no-one would know where it would lead, I point out that the same is true for phlogiston; one changed the world and the other went nowhere. My point is that just because something has so-far not been shown to be useful does not imply that it will eventually change the world.
dave333 3y ago
Interesting that electricity has been useful in bringing about things Voltaire championed such as freedom of speech, and abolition of (slave) labor. However I think you meant Volta the inventor of the battery. Also QC seems to suffer from the opposite of lack of imagination about what it might be good for.
riffraff 3y ago
> Voltaire I suspect you mean Volta[0], tho I did wonder if Voltaire[1] worked with electricity :) [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alessandro_Volta https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alessandro_Volta [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voltaire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voltaire

jairuhme 3y ago

I sat in on a seminar with the Cleveland Clinic and IBM as they have a partnership around quantum, and one of the big problems they were working on was using it to speed up drug discovery. I don't recall if they have solved problems completely yet, but it has sped up the discovery process by orders of magnitude.

mechagodzilla 3y ago
Nothing involving quantum computing has sped up the 'drug discovery' process by orders of magnitude. At best it has 'accelerated' some toy QM problem that is likely a dozen steps removed from anything you could call drug discovery. I'd love to be proven wrong, but I've yet to see any non-trivial computational chemistry work done on quantum computers.

hackandthink 3y ago

21 was factored into 3 and 7 You have to start somewhere.

deng 3y ago
Please also note that they did not run Shor's algorithm to compute this. They had to greatly simplify the algorithm, so that it works specifically for the number '21'.
- jjgreen 3y ago
  For details on this, see the first answer in https://crypto.stackexchange.com/questions/59795/ https://crypto.stackexchange.com/questions/59795/

StackOverlord 3y ago

Quantinuum is already tackling NLP question-answering tasks, it runs on quantum hardware. The quantum categorial crowd is adamant they'll surpass ChatGPT (the big promise iirc is that it will scale linearly with context length, GPT scales quadratically). For instance see this tweet by Quantinuum head of research and this burgeoning field's main rock: https://twitter.com/coecke/status/1655695990739927040?s=20 https://twitter.com/coecke/status/1655695990739927040?s=20 Coecke went from supervising dozen of thesis at Oxford Quantum (logic) Group to preparing summer camps for high school pupils this year. It's also taking off socially/academically, and observing the field evolving we might have a quantum equivalent of ChatGPT before or at the same time we get implementations of Shor's algorithm (source: my own intuition). See this for instance: https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.11523 https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.11523

cgranade 3y ago
The problem you'll run into for any application of quantum computing to large language models is that quantum computers just aren't very good at big data applications. There's two reasons for that: - Current devices, as well as devices likely to be built in the near- to medium-term are quite limited in the number of qubits that they implement. The current record for the most fault-tolerant qubits in a single device is 1. That's a hell of a lot better than where the field was at a couple years ago, but it's far from the huge amount of data that needs to be processed for LLM training and evaluation. - Even if you have enough qubits to store training data, looking them up on a quantum device is still challenging due to what's sometimes called the qRAM problem. It's not trivial to make a quantum oracle that returns the data stored at a given index, and it's still an area of ongoing research to figure out how to do that. That's part of why you see quantum algorithms being developed less for big data tasks and more for big compute tasks like chemistry. There, the program might be very large, but size of the input that has to be stored within the quantum devices and the size of the output you measure back out are both quite small, even down to a single floating-point number in some cases. (source: I've worked in quantum computing for about twenty years now.)
- pmoriarty 3y ago
  "The current record for the most fault-tolerant qubits in a single device is 1." Can you comment on Google's[1] and IBM's[2] announcements of 70 and 433 qubit quantum computers? Is this just marketing hype? Are the qubits not fault tolerant? Is fault tolerance really necessary to get useful results? [1] - https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2023/07/02/google-quantum-computer-breakthrough-instant-calculations/ https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2023/07/02/google-quant... [2] - https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/05/25/1073606/ibm-wants-to-build-a-100000-qubit-quantum-computer/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/05/25/1073606/ibm-want...