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I am very tired of this quantum computing nonsense. I have been hearing about it overtaking everything for almost 20 years (when I did my PhD). While the EU and

by zero_k 3y ago

I am very tired of this quantum computing nonsense. I have been hearing about it overtaking everything for almost 20 years (when I did my PhD). While the EU and the US has been pumping money into quantum for all these years, they completely missed the AI revolution, and have been chronically underfunding basic research (e.g. what I'm partial to, formal methods). You can still get tons of money from funding agencies by _somehow_ incorporating "quantum" into your funding proposal. It's a joke. I remember being at the SAT conference 2 years ago (co-located with all other formal methods conferences), and I raised my concern about the BS that was accepted as a research paper again doing some nonsense quantum stuff, and the person from Intel was like, we are almost at 100 qbits, end of the year! Pinky Promise! Of course none of that happened. They promised 1000s of qbits in just a decade 20 years ago. Best part is that even when they have 10s of thousands of qbits they can't show me a single, actually useful, revolutionary application other than breaking RSA, which is laughable (yada-yada some optimization problems, sorry, but no, the more you dig, the more it's obvious it is nonsense). Billions of EUR into this fever dream and they got completely blind-sided by deep learning (which they _also_ under-funded until industry picked it up and made it work). It's the same idiots who demoted Katalin Kario who recently got the Nobel recently for mRNA vaccines. I sometimes really get tired of Academia.

dgacmu 3y ago
Quantum is absolutely over-hyped. But so are many "really exciting but far off" projects. And so is AI (he says, having gotten a lot of funding to work in machine learning systems). But that doesn't mean that it's bad to continue funding research into it at some level, in the same way that we fund fusion research, and all-optical computing, etc. It's just a question about balance. Unlike, say, blockchain, we know there _are_ useful applications for a quantum computer; cryptography, as you noted, but also things like quantum chemistry, and possibly some optimization problems. But they're also quite far off and many require stable qbits way beyond what we can build today. It's a shame that funding at some levels requires excessive hype. It's as much a condemnation of our science funding system as anything.

by zero_k 3y ago

dgacmu 3y ago

Quantum is absolutely over-hyped. But so are many "really exciting but far off" projects. And so is AI (he says, having gotten a lot of funding to work in machine learning systems). But that doesn't mean that it's bad to continue funding research into it at some level, in the same way that we fund fusion research, and all-optical computing, etc. It's just a question about balance. Unlike, say, blockchain, we know there _are_ useful applications for a quantum computer; cryptography, as you noted, but also things like quantum chemistry, and possibly some optimization problems. But they're also quite far off and many require stable qbits way beyond what we can build today. It's a shame that funding at some levels requires excessive hype. It's as much a condemnation of our science funding system as anything.