27 ms·

The Google Willow Thing

763 points by Bootvis 2y ago

imranq 2y ago
Summary: Its a real result, the cool part is more qubits seem to live longer rather than shorter, bad part the results are not explicitly verifiable, only through extrapolation
- NooneAtAll3 2y ago
  you're mixing up 2 different results a) error-correction needs small level of errors to begin with to amplify signal - we finally got to that point, and larger correction setup deals with more errors b) "standard" benchmark problem now 100% computes something uncomputable with classic chips (in practice) - the problem is that it's so quantum, neither it is verifiable with classic chips anymore
mupuff1234 2y ago
I just want to know if the stock movement is justified or not.
- Vecr 2y ago
  Stock movements aren't generally justified.
- crazygringo 2y ago
  Oh wow it was up 6.2% at one point this morning from yesterday, now 4.6%.
- deleted 2y ago
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- deleted 2y ago
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- dboreham 2y ago
  You never know the reason for a stock move. Could be that people see Oracle's poor results today as reason GCP will make more money.
  - crazygringo 2y ago
    If you're a journalist and simply phone a few institutional investors who make up the bulk of this kind of trading and with who you have a trusting relationship, they'll tell you. If they all mostly agree, that's your answer. And it's almost always what you assumed anyways from the news, because this stuff isn't rocket science. So for all practical purposes, yes actually you usually do know, whenever a stock movement is large enough that it's clearly outside the normal noise of day trading. I mean, can you prove the reason with 100% mathematical certainty? No. But can you be 99% sure? Of course.
- praptak 2y ago
  I want the ability to answer such questions with an accuracy slightly over 50%.
  - amoss 2y ago
    return false
- melvinmelih 2y ago
  Depends on which universe you're talking about.
- vasco 2y ago
  You don't need a quantum computer to know everything from now until the end of times has already been priced in.
aeternum 2y ago
>it would also take ~10^25 years for a classical computer to directly verify the quantum computer’s results!! This claim makes little sense. There are many problems that are much easier to verify than to solve. Why isn't that approach ever used to validate these quantum computing claims?
- svachalek 2y ago
  I think he was making that exact point in this blog.
- aidenn0 2y ago
  Right, Factoring and discrete logs both come to mind; is Google's quantum computer not able to achieve measurable speedups on those versus classical computation?
  - fastball 2y ago
    Google's chip is not general enough to perform any quantum algorithm.
    - tmvphil 2y ago
      It is perfectly general, but the error rate is too high to operate all qubits simultaneously for more than a few tens of gates without error. This is why error correction is needed but then you need orders of magnitude more physical qubits to deal with the overhead.
      - fastball 2y ago
        Then why can they perform an RCS evaluation but not some other algo? RCS requires the least number of qubits by a huge margin?
        drkevorkian 2y ago
        No, not quite, it's about the error-per-gate. RCS has very loose requirements on the error per gate, since all they need is enough gates to build up some arbitrary entangled state (a hundred or so gates on this system). Other algorithms have very tight requirements on the error-per-gate, since they must perform a very long series of operations without error.
ChrisArchitect 2y ago
Related: Willow, Our Quantum Chip https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42367649 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42367649
01HNNWZ0MV43FF 2y ago
> No doubt people will ask me what this means for superconducting qubits versus trapped-ion or neutral-atom or photonic qubits, I only wonder what it means for cryptography. The letters "crypt" don't appear in the text.
- Filligree 2y ago
  Nothing, yet.
- NooneAtAll3 2y ago
  quantum computing is entering "middle-late 1930s" - it's still quite some time away from Turing&Enigma moment but it already passed "1920s" with "only radios" - analog, non-digital devices stability tech is almost here (check quanta magazine), next is the scaling up
  - adastra22 2y ago
    As noted in the article, it could be a very sharp transition from "largest factorization performed so far is 3x7=21" to "we can factor real-world RSA." If you want to make a classical computing analogy, it's like we're struggling to make transistors with more than a single 9 of reliability, and obviously you can't do complex computation with a circuit where every step gives garbage 1-in-10 times. Except it's not's obvious. 90% reliability could probably be made to work with silicon transistors with bog standard error correcting logic at the hardware level. Quantum error is a little bit more troublesome to work with, but there are also no known theoretical reasons error correction wouldn't work at existing error rates. We just need better algorithms, which might very well exist. Or, the next generation of chips would offer more 9's reliability, and even with existing error correction just a few more sigma in reliability would put us over the tipping point of being able to make reliable large-scale systems.
  - fluoridation 2y ago
    There were mechanical computers before the 20th century that had more complexity (in terms of total information) and were more useful than quantum computers are.
blast 2y ago
Damn he's funny. For 20 years I’ve been trying to teach the world how to fish in Hilbert space, but (sigh) I suppose I’ll just hand out some more fish.
munchler 2y ago
The argument in favor of the Everettian multiverse (“where else could the computation have happened, if it wasn’t being farmed out to parallel universes?”) seems illogical to me. Aren't these parallel universes running the same computation at the same time, and thus also "farming out" part of their computations to us? If so, it's a zero-sum game, so how could there be an overall performance gain for all the universes?
- Filligree 2y ago
  That's not really how MWI works. There isn't some fixed number of universes; actually, there aren't really distinct universes (or timelines) at all. Attempting to count them is about like trying to measure the length of a coastline; they blend together once you zoom far enough in. Running the quantum computer causes 'new timelines' to be created. Though so would ordinary atoms just sitting there; the tricky thing about quantum computers is making it so the split is temporary. So the quantum computer gets split into multiple versions of itself, does some computation in each, and merges the results. This isn't map-reduce; there's a strictly limited set of ways in which you can do the merger, all of which are weird from a classical perspective. You can argue for MWI based on this, because the computations that got merged still had to happen somewhere. It's incompatible with Copenhagen, more so the bigger and longer-lasting the computation gets. It's not, strictly speaking, incompatible with pilot wave theory; but pilot wave theory is MWI plus an additional declaration that "Here, you see this timeline here? That's the real one, all the others are fake. Yes, all the computation needed to instantiate them still happens, but they lack the attribute of being real." Though that makes PWT incompatible with computationalism, and hence with concepts such as mind-uploading. Which is a bullet you can choose to bite, of course...
  - munchler 2y ago
    Thank you. This makes sense.
  - monero-xmr 2y ago
    I’d prefer to say we just go back in time the moment it collapses. How can you disagree with me? No proof of anything and we can all contrive untestable solutions. No wait, it’s actually God who exists in the wave collapse, and His divine intervention does the computation.
JKCalhoun 2y ago
What does quantum computing need to move forward? Will just throwing a lot of money at the thing allow it to scale? Or are there fundamental problems blocking it that require new physics or new material sciences?
- ryandamm 2y ago
  I was told by a Microsoft researcher that it will unlock currently unsolvable problems in chemistry, weather modeling, materials science, fusion and plasma physics, drug development… the list went on but it was really long. Most advances he cited would result from improved simulations, iirc. I don’t recall enough of the conversation (circa 2019) to remember anything about the properties of the problems it helps solve, so I can’t help generalize. Sorry.
  - gauge_field 2y ago
    Here is a perspective from another MS researcher: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WY3htdKUGsA&t=1564s&ab_channel=SimonsInstitute https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WY3htdKUGsA&t=1564s&ab_chann... Essentially, they argue that unless strong algorithmic breakthrough happens (e.g. having cubic speedup, instead of quadratic), the only practical problem for which quantum computer will be useful, are those where you get exponential speed up:simulation of quantum systems (and breaking of RSA encyrption if you count that). Even those are challenged by other (approximate) simulation by Classical Deep Learning. There will be some quantum models for which quantum supremacy will be useful and Deep Learning wont. The question what classes of systems.
- EvgeniyZh 2y ago
  It's hard to say. For example the Google's paper talks about some rare (once an hour) strong errors. Are they fundamental or have some easy fix? We don't know. One obvious problem is cooling. We can't cool million qubits in a single fridge, so we will need to split them between fridges and communicate. Also, the wiring is really complicated already and hard to scale (one reason IBM has heavy hex is to have more space). Another problem is connectivity. For transmon qubits connectivity is fixed. Applying gate to two far qubits requires a lot of swaps, which is expensive. This is less of a problem for ions or cold atoms because they can couple any two qubits; but they likely wouldn't be able to for large amount of qubits. Another thing is classical control, because the classical data needs to be processed at high speed. Some companies develop specialized hardware for that. None of these is necessarily fundamental, but these problems need to be solved, in addition to usual scaling (it is hard to manufacture these devices and it becomes harder with each qubit).
daft_pink 2y ago
I just want to know when this thing is going to put me out of work forever with it’s insane and crazy math skills.
- talldayo 2y ago
  I don't think it has crazy math skills at all. That's what classical computing is really good at - give it a problem of arbitrary length and a computer should be able to string together instructions to yield you a sum. Quantum computing, especially right now, is simply focused on getting reliable input/output idempotency. It will be a really long time before it has insane and crazy math skills, and when it does, traditional CPU architectures will probably outperform it. TL:DR - if the Texas Instrument calculator didn't put you out of a job, neither will quantum computers.
  - eastbound 2y ago
    Aren’t matrix calculations a perfect field for quantum computing? i.e. AI would progress extremely fast, wouldn’t it?
    - tmvphil 2y ago
      No, not really. There is no speed up for general matrix multiply, and generally it won't be practical for any problem with large amounts of input and output data. Closest thing is HHL algorithm for solving big linear systems, which requires a bunch of caveats on the matrix, and even then, it needs to be a subroutine of another quantum algorithm, since it outputs a quantum state, and not the full vector.
- bawolff 2y ago
  Unless your job involves factoring numbers into primes (or a few other limited math problems) probably never.
- galaxyLogic 2y ago
  There's two great lanes of progress happening in engineering these days: 1. Quantum Computing, and 2. AI. If they can find some synergies between the two, that could be THE major development. Make better AI by using Quantum Computers, and make better Quantum Computers by applying AI.
machina_ex_deus 2y ago
Before invoking parallel universes, how about comparing the system to nature's mind-boggling number of particles in the macroscopic world? A single gram contains 10^23=2^76 particles. Google's random circuit sampling experiment used only 67 qubits, Which is still order of magnitude below 76. I wonder why, the chip had 105 qubits and the error correction experiment used 101 qubits. Did Google's experiment encounter problems when trying to run RCS on the full 105 qubits device? Before saying that the computation invoked parallel universes, first I'd like to see that the computation couldn't be explained by the state being encoded classically by the state of the particles in the system.
- zh3 2y ago
  Somehow the universe knows how to organise the sand in an egg timer to form an orderly pile. Simulating that with a classical computer seems impossible - yet the universe "computes" the correct result in real time. It feels like there is a huge gap between what actually happens and what can be done with a computer (even a quantum one).
  - onlyrealcuzzo 2y ago
    > Somehow the universe knows how to organise the sand in an egg timer to form an orderly pile. Simulating that with a classical computer seems impossible Is it really? There's only ~500,000 grains of sand in an egg timer. I don't know anything here, but this seems like something that shouldn't be impossible. So I'm curious. Why is this impossible? What am I missing?
    - GeneralMayhem 2y ago
      The real issue is that the sand isn't orderly sorted. At a micro level, it's billions and trillions of individual interactions between atoms that create the emergent behavior of solid grains of sand packing reasonably tightly but not phasing through each other.
    - zh3 2y ago
      Maybe it's not that hard to simulate, but let's start with looking at just two of the sand grains that happen to hit each other? They collide, how they rebound is all angles, internal structure, Young's modulus, they have electrostatic interactions, even the Van der Walls force come into play. Sand grains aren't regular, consider how determining the precise point at which two irregular objects collide is quite a challenge (and this isn't even a game, approximations to save compute time won't do what the real world does 'naturally'). So while we can - for something as simple and regular as an eggtimer - come up with some workable approximations, the approximation would surely fall short when it comes to the detail (an analytical solution for the path of every single grain).
Cataleya 2y ago
[flagged]
dataflow 2y ago
Dumb question: can someone explain the following? Imagine a ball falling on the ground. Simulating the O(10^23) atoms in each one with a classical computer would take (say) 10^23 times the amount of work of simulating a single atom. Depending on the level of detail, that could easily take, you know, many, many years... We don't call the ball a supercomputer or a quantum computer just because it's so much more efficient than a classical computer here. I presume that's because it can't do arbitrary computation this quickly, right? So in what way are these quantum computers different? Can they do arbitrary computations?
- qnleigh 2y ago
  Great question. The device is fully programable. Arbitrary one-qubit operations and arbitrary two-qubit operations between adjacent qubits can be performed. Theoretically these are 'universal for computation', meaning that a large enough device could compute anything computable. You can't program Quantum Tetris or whatever on a bouncy ball :). But nevertheless, many of these 'beyond-classical' demonstrations feel a bit arbitrary in the way you describe, and there's good reason for this. Logical operations are still quite noisy, and the more you apply, the more output quality degrades. To get the most 'beyond-classical,' you run the thing that maps most readily to the physical layout and limitations of the hardware. As things improve, we'll see more and more demonstrations of actually useful computations. Google and others have already performed lots of quantum simulations. In the long run, you will use quantum error correction, which is the other big announcement this week.
  - dataflow 2y ago
    Thank you!
  - fluoridation 2y ago
    So isn't this the same as turning a classical computer on and letting it run on whatever garbage is on the RAM at that time, and when some nonsense shows up on the screen breathlessly exclaim that it would take several millennia to get the same result with an abacus, despite the fact that something was "computed" only by strict adherence to the definition of the word? It's not like it takes a quantum computer to produce a meaningless stream of data.
TZubiri 2y ago
[flagged]
- refulgentis 2y ago
  > Anyone can write about quantum computers as if they are remotely qualified He's the quantum guy. [^2] You're applying classical computing intuitions (where verification is indeed usually much faster than computation) to quantum computing, where this relationship doesn't necessarily hold. The fact that verification can be as hard as computation in quantum computing is actually a major challenge that Aaronson has written about extensively. n.b. I've been here 15 years but sometimes have to take a step back and adjust my approach, because I can use this as a quick break to let out frustration with something else. When I do, I find the HN guidelines helpful, almost a joy. [^1] They're written conversationally and are more meditations than rules. [^1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html > Be kind. Don't be snarky. [...] Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive. "Other threads in these comments talk about some rick and morty multiverse type of thing, just stay on the sidelines guys" > Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something. "Anybody can write about quantum computers as if they are remotely qualified" > Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. From Aaronson's actual post: "...for the exact same reason why this quantum computation would take ~10^25 years for a classical computer to simulate, it would also take ~10^25 years for a classical computer to directly verify the quantum computer's results!!" He goes on: "...this is why I've been obsessing for years about the need to design efficiently verifiable near-term quantum supremacy experiments." [^2] • Received the [2020 ACM Prize in Computing](https://awards.acm.org/about/2020-acm-prize https://awards.acm.org/about/2020-acm-prize) for groundbreaking contributions to quantum computing • [ACM Fellow (2019)](https://www.acm.org/media-center/2019/december/fellows-2019 https://www.acm.org/media-center/2019/december/fellows-2019) for contributions to quantum computing and computational complexity • Named [Simons Investigator (2017)](https://www.simonsfoundation.org/mathematics-physical-sciences/simons-investigators/simons-investigators-awardees/ https://www.simonsfoundation.org/mathematics-physical-scienc...) • Won the [Alan T. Waterman Award (2012)](https://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=123406 https://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=123406), NSF's most prestigious young researcher award • Received [Presidential Early Career Award](https://www.nsf.gov/awards/PECASE/recip_details.jsp?pecase_id=261 https://www.nsf.gov/awards/PECASE/recip_details.jsp?pecase_i...) for Scientists and Engineers (2009) • Awarded [Sloan Research Fellowship](https://news.mit.edu/2009/sloan-fellows-0217 https://news.mit.edu/2009/sloan-fellows-0217) (2009) • Won multiple Best Student Paper Awards: - Danny Lewin Best Paper at [STOC](https://www.sigact.org/prizes/student.html https://www.sigact.org/prizes/student.html) for quantum computing proofs in local search (2004) - Best Paper at [Complexity Conference](https://computationalcomplexity.org/conferences.php https://computationalcomplexity.org/conferences.php) for quantum advice limitations (2004) - Best Paper at Complexity Conference for quantum certificate complexity (2003)
nsxwolf 2y ago
Man, reading this makes me feel so small. Being a "software engineer" consuming APIs and updating database rows seems laughably childish compared to whatever the hell it is I just read. I can't even imagine why I should bother trying to understand it. It's completely inaccessible. Only an elite few get to touch these machines.
- arresin 2y ago
  I had exactly the same thought. I read it after struggling for hours, making notes, etc, with a very hard (to me) part of my code and it made it seem pretty trivial.
- gist 2y ago
  Anything that someone else does that you don't understand or can't do always sounds super important, impressive, and enviable. Usually. But you have to realize that he spends his life doing and thinking about this. And will stipulate he's gifted in this area. I've never heard of him but managed to download his CV. I will also note that sometimes when I read HN links and think one thing then read the comments and people know enough to take issue with what is being said and even call it out.
- brailsafe 2y ago
  > I can't even imagine why I should bother trying to understand it. Well, maybe you should just try for the hell of it and see how far you get? Becoming fit seems impossible to a morbidly obese 45 y.o, and it is if that person's expectation is unreasonable, but if they just change it to be more reasonable, break it down into manageable routines, then they can get somewhere eventually. Find some papers, fill many gaps, dedicate a few years in your spare time, in 6 months you'll be 6 months closer than you were. Whether there's a reason or not, idk, it's something to do, be curious. Don't forget that by dedicating their life to something, they're naturally not dedicating their life to other things, things that you might be able to do, like climbing mountains, making pizza, or coming up with witty banter in social situations.
  - rkp8000 2y ago
    MSR has a very clear and accessible tutorial on quantum computing for anyone interested in getting up to speed with the fundamentals: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F_Riqjdh2oM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F_Riqjdh2oM .
joak 2y ago
The hardware is progressing, we have a issue though: we don't have algorithms to run on quantum computers. Besides Shor's algorithm, useful to break RSA, we have nothing. Just vague ideas like: it could be useful for quantum simulations or optimisation or maybe ... If tomorrow we have a full running quantum computing what would we run on it? We are in a vacuum. The only hope is a breakthrough in quantum algorithms. Nothing in sight, not much progress on this side. Oh yes, Zapata Computing, the best funded company in quantum algorithms just went under this year.
- phoronixrly 2y ago
  Sorry but you need to cite some sources... The fact that random adtech devs on HN have no algorithms useful to them to run on a QC does not mean much to me.
  - reikonomusha 2y ago
    No-nonsense roll-up of what algorithms a quantum computer can run in principle, along with their big-O speed ups (which don't necessarily reflect practical speed ups): https://quantumalgorithmzoo.org/ https://quantumalgorithmzoo.org/
  - griomnib 2y ago
    You’ve provided me with a beautiful framing to understand some of the most obtuse and self-serving arguments I see on here: “random adtech devs”.
    - TZubiri 2y ago
      laugh as we may, they get the money.
  - gauge_field 2y ago
    Here is another paper about its applicability on a range of problems: https://cacm.acm.org/research/disentangling-hype-from-practicality-on-realistically-achieving-quantum-advantage/#R12 https://cacm.acm.org/research/disentangling-hype-from-practi...
bambax 2y ago
> Having said that, the biggest caveat to the “10^25 years” result is one to which I fear Google drew insufficient attention. Namely, for the exact same reason why (as far as anyone knows) this quantum computation would take ~10^25 years for a classical computer to simulate, it would also take ~10^25 years for a classical computer to directly verify the quantum computer’s results!! I don't understand that part, can someone explain? There should be plenty of problems that take a long time to solve, but are trivial to verify? Like for example factoring extremely large numbers that are the product of a few very large primes? Maybe not on the order of 10^25 years, but still?
- refulgentis 2y ago
  This computation is... handwaves, most handwaving I've done in a while...initializing a random state, and it's well-understood whether this state was randomly initialized isn't computable in a reasonable timeframe on classical computers. ends extreme handwaving This nerd sniped a bunch of us, because it sounds like "oh we proved P!=NP", the keys to understanding are A) hanging onto the this in "this computation" (this is easier when you're familiar with the computation and it's contextual history in the field) B) remembering prime factors as a plausible application of QC. Then faced with the contradiction of B, it's neatly resolved by "yes, but the quantum computer isn't big enough to do prime factorization yet" As noted somewhat sideways in the blog, if someone has a computation that is A) not classically computable in a reasonable timeframe B) is computable on a miniscule quantum computer C) can be verified on a classic computer in a reasonable timeframe, a lot of researchers will be excited.
  - jl6 2y ago
    Does this mean that the problem of not being able to verify QC results will go away in the scenario where we have a large enough QC to solve an NP problem?
    - refulgentis 2y ago
      Correct, you nailed it. FWIW: There were some really cool comments on the last article re: Willow. One of them being, a reference to a apparently well-known "roadmap" of quantum scaling that apparently got written up a few years back. Apparently the Willow result was the 2026 baseline projection. So their message was "well...not too big a deal, we achieved 2026 at ~2025." Also said that the same roadmap would have that achieved in 15-20 years.
flkenosad 2y ago
Could bitcoin miners use this to "guess" the next block?
- LZ_Khan 2y ago
  Yes, but I'm pretty sure the moment this is achieved bitcoin's price will collapse. And the investment required to produce such a machine is undoubtedly in the XX billions.
  - TZubiri 2y ago
    "Yes, but I'm pretty sure the moment this is achieved bitcoin's price will collapse." Not necessarily. There's two interpretations to the question: 1. QC would be very efficient and mine efficiently. 2. QC would break SHA and would be able to reverse the hashing function at O(1). In scenario 1. The difficulty would increase. The mining rate globally always stays the same. And the voting power would be distributed amongst the holders of the new compute, this has happened before with ASICs. Usually there's some graduality to it, and the capital is distributed so that there is never a 51% monopoly. It's especially relevant how big the jump is, if the new computer is stronger than all of the existing miners combined, then they get 100% theoretically (although with malice). In that case there would probably be a fork or as you put it, BTC would collapse. However, if you have that power, holding BTC is probably not that important anyway. The actual compute is worth more. On scenario 2. Yes BTC would crash, but then again the actual compute power would be more impactful. BTC would crash but so would encryption, and planes and the world.
    - Solvitieg 2y ago
      > BTC would crash but so would encryption, and planes and the world. Sad to see Bitcoin advocates use this dismissive argument. Centralized systems will update their software as the threat increases. Meanwhile, there are no serious proposals for a quantum-resistance Bitcoin. Some are estimating the update will require a hard fork and take 1 year to update.
      - 2y ago
bradleyjg 2y ago
The problem it solved would take a septillion years to do on a conventional computer but no one other than a quantum researcher cares about that problem. How about solving a problem someone that’s not a quantum researcher would care about. Give me traveling salesmen with n=10. Or factor a 10 digit number. Something. Until then quantum computers are in the same category as commercial fusion. Long on “breakthroughs”, zero on results. Look at cancer researchers for a nice contrast. The annual number of “breakthrough that could cure cancer!1!” announcements have dropped to near zero while steady, real progress is being made all the time.
- asdasdsddd 2y ago
  [dead]
- kccqzy 2y ago
  Google says the next step is to find a problem with real life application. From https://blog.google/technology/research/google-willow-quantum-chip/ https://blog.google/technology/research/google-willow-quantu... > The next challenge for the field is to demonstrate a first "useful, beyond-classical" computation on today's quantum chips that is relevant to a real-world application.
  - simpaticoder 2y ago
    I always assumed the obvious application was for Google to make a QaaS (Quantum as a Service) for factoring large primes. One obvious big customer would be intellegence agencies, especially the NSA.
    - thehappypm 2y ago
      Can you imagine? Send us a number, we send you the factors. And a bill. With lots of zeroes
    - ilya_m 2y ago
      The only problem with this business model is that once you factored one number, you kill your market - people will stop using pre-quantum crypto. (The obvious retort is that NSA would have harvested a ton of RSA/EC-encrypted traffic by then and would keep cracking ciphers going back decades. Unfortunately, old secrets is a rapidly depreciating asset class.)
urbandw311er 2y ago
> No doubt people will ask > me what this means for > superconducting qubits > versus trapped-ion or > neutral-atom or > photonic qubits I laughed at this. If I understood more than literally 2 words of that, then yes - no doubt I would ask about that.
- andyferris 2y ago
  It’s the implementation of the quantum computer - what are the qubits and gates and things made of? It is like we are still figuring out whether it’s better to use vacuum tubes or semiconductors or what. Google used superconducting circuits for Willow, which can be fabricated with computer-chip-style lithography etc, but needs to be kept extremely cold and the connectivity is obviously etched permanently into the circuit. Other technologies have different pros and cons.
  - urbandw311er 2y ago
    Thank you, much appreciated
devit 2y ago
Where's the performance on common useful tasks? What's the largest number it can factor using Shor's algorithm? What's the largest hash it can compute a pre-image for using Grover's algorithm?
- sgt101 2y ago
  I think the record for Shor's remains at 15.
krick 2y ago
Surprisingly sparse on actual information considering all this humble-bragging (actually, not even so humble) about how he was teaching peasants to catch fish for 20 years, to be forced yet again to hand it out with his own bare hands! Well, he didn't hand out much. The post reiterates some facts from the original statement, which are pretty vague for most, I believe. The only useful clarification is that simulation results are indeed unverifiable, lol (as some might have suspected, but still nice to have a definitive confirmation from somebody who is supposedly an expert on this). Then it addresses the cringeworthy "Everettian multiverse" statement discussion. Granted, it indeed was one of the most discussed things on the previous thread, but I have honestly assumed that it's so obviously moot that one can simply ignore it. Everyone knows that at least one of top-3 threads on HN comments must be either a lame joke or some sort of bikeshedding argument. And that's pretty much it. "This blogger said this usual generic words, that reporter asked for an interview, but I declined, also, kudos to Google team for amazing work, it's unclear if it's any good, but it surely isn't bad!" Uh, ok, thanks for the clarification, man. I get it that this post was written in a hurry, but given all that "fish-handing" stuff and all these commenters in this very thread complaining about how they don't know the difference between "trapped-ion or neutral-atom" qubits (as if this distinction was the very essence of the post, which author paid much more attention to than to his responses to NYT journalists) it just doesn't deliver. ...So, what did I expect? Well, I didn't expect anything, but let's state the obvious. Google's benchmark was to produce some very specific (and unverifiable) random distribution (which, BTW, he kinda says, but waaay less clearly than it could have been said). Obviously, nobody cares about that. Everyone cares about when they will be able to run Shor's algorithm on Google's Chip, and factor primes and deprecate RSA into oblivion. Obviously. Some may wonder why it's not possible to do it on that Willow thing, others may suspect that it may have something to do with the fact they need a ton of "physical" qubits to emulate logical qubits because of error-correction. Also, it is widely advertised, that the very thing that is special about Willow is vastly better (and somehow "more promising to scale") error-correction. So, what people really want from a generous and skillful fisherman is obviously some critical, appropriately-speculative, ELI5-style analysis of the updated state of the art. What does Willow have, what does it need to become practical, what are some realistic projections on when we can get there. Where is all of that? Where is the fucking fish?!
partloyaldemon 2y ago
"except now with the PR blitz from Sundar Pichai on down" I definitely read this first pass and thought 'damn the CEO is hitting its own quantum supercomputer with bug reports'. that's cold. It just came out.
man4 2y ago
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de6u99er 2y ago
IMHO, we're still a long way from anything truly useful. The problem Google used to demonstrate quantum supremacy feels more like a glorified random number generator. Even if quantum computers can generate results faster, processing and storing the data still takes a lot of time. It’s hard not to draw a parallel with claims about "instantaneous quantum communication," where entangled particles appear to defy the speed of light — it seems impressive at first, but the practical value remains unclear.
- blharr 2y ago
  Isn't instant communication impossible, even with entanglement?
  - JeffAllen 2y ago
    I'ts not communication it's coordination of 2 (or more) entangled particles. (spooky action at a distance)
megamix 2y ago
This is how miracles work. They are just physical laws fast forward, I like how this explains the ancient miracles. So maybe our previous generations had access to these things and it was lost along the way.
- chikere232 2y ago
  You need more science
  - megamix 2y ago
    Oh there's enough science here. But to understand if someone needs more science, we should reach the conclusion scientifically. Etc etc
- rudi_mk 2y ago
  > I like how this explains the ancient miracles ...which ancient miracles are you possibly alluding to here?
Sergii001 2y ago
It becomes more and more interesting
LikeBeans 2y ago
In simple terms, if I understand quantum computing, and please correct me if I'm wrong, the big benefit is parallel computing at a massive scale whereas classical computing is serial in nature. If yes likely both method are useful. But a very useful use case for quantum computing is AI training to create the models. Currently consumes a lot of GPUs but QC has nice chance to impact such a use case. Did I get it right?
- batmansmk 2y ago
  Ahaha! Read the subtitle of the blog, literally at the top: "If you take nothing else from this blog: quantum computers won't solve hard problems instantly by just trying all solutions in parallel."
- panda-giddiness 2y ago
  > the big benefit is parallel computing at a massive scale The problem with this line of reasoning is that, even though a quantum system might have many possible states, we only observe a single one of those states at the time of measurement. If you could somehow prepare a quantum system such that it encoded the N equally-likely solutions to your classical problem, you would still need to rerun that experiment (on average) N times to get the correct answer. Broadly speaking, quantum computing exploits the fact that states are entangled (and therefore correlated). By tweaking the circuit, you can make it so that incorrect solutions interfere destructively while the correct solution interferes constructively, making it more likely that you will measure the correct answer. (Of course this is all probabilistic, hence the need for quantum error correction.) But developing quantum algorithms is easier said than done, and there's no reason to think a priori that all classical problems can be recast in this manner.
  - sgt101 2y ago
    I think that the big challenge is to recast any classical computations as quantum computations with a superpolynomial speedup. I think that all classical problems can be cast as quantum computations because quantum computation is just computation - I believe that one can implement a turning machine using quantum gates, so arbitrary computation is possible with quantum gates. The superpolynomial speedups are the thing.. I wonder if these will be limited to a class of computations that have no physical realization - just pure maths.
r33b33 2y ago
Can someone just give it to me straight: should I sell my crypto positions and move to stock indices and real estate? Yes or no? No nuance, just yes or no.
- sgt101 2y ago
  no not for the next 5 years for sure.
- kimchidude 2y ago
  Asking the real questions here. I got that ‘Google has been talking about Willow for ages, this isn’t new’ blah blah blah. The problem is the public only started talking about it yesterday.
- LittleTimothy 2y ago
  No. This is progress towards quantum computing but no where near progress towards a real practical quantum computer that could break Bitcoin's algorithms. If progress continues it could be an issue in the future, check back in next time Google publishes a paper.
- Mistletoe 2y ago
  No, won’t all your stocks and financial information be gone also? Also Willow can’t even factor 15=5x3 you are good for a very long time.
nuancebydefault 2y ago
>> But for anyone who wonders why I’ve been obsessing for years about the need to design efficiently verifiable near-term quantum supremacy experiments: well, this is why! We’re now deeply into the unverifiable regime that I warned about. Can anybody explain me why it is hard to find a problem that can be solved only by a basic quantum computer within a short timespan and can be easily verified by a normal computer? I thought there are so many algo's out there for which one direction is fast and the reverse takes ages.
thrance 2y ago
Still no real potential applications beyond factoring large integers (of dubious use) and doing some obscure quantum physics simulations. QC companies are selling quantum AI and quantum finance and other hand wavy stuff. Yet, I don't see any algorithms that has a proven advantage in these domains over classical ones running on clusters of GPUs.
r33b33 2y ago
Let's talk about things that actually matter - where to invest in post-quantum world? I'll keep this short. - Google’s Willow quantum chip significantly outpaces current supercomputers, solving tasks in minutes that would otherwise take billions of years. - Hypothesis: Accelerating advancements in tech and AI could lead to quantum supremacy arriving sooner than the 2030s, contrary to expert predictions. - Legacy banking systems, being centralized, could transition faster to post-quantum-safe encryption by freezing transfers, re-checking processes, and migrating to new protocols in a controlled manner. - Decentralized cryptocurrencies face bigger challenges:Hard forks are difficult to coordinate across a decentralized network. - Transitioning to quantum-safe algorithms could lead to longer transaction signatures and significantly higher fees, eroding trust in the system. - If quantum computers compromise current cryptography, tangible assets (e.g., real estate, stock indices) may retain more value compared to digital assets like crypto. Thoughts?
- almostgotcaught 2y ago
  Literally none of this is correct. > - Google’s Willow quantum chip significantly outpaces current supercomputers, solving tasks in minutes that would otherwise take billions of years. billions of years you say? Just what kinds of "computing tasks" we talkin about here?
  - r33b33 2y ago
    Okay, explain why and how it is not correct then? I genuinely want to learn and figure out what is the truth and what is the best route of action when it comes to securing a portfolio.
    - simonh 2y ago
      Willow only implements one single error corrected logical Qubit, using over 100 physical qubits. So far the test they have done is only applicable to an extremely narrow problem domain, approaching the limit of how practically useless a problem domain can be. I may be exaggerating slightly. As Google's own team report "Google will only consider itself to have created a “true” fault-tolerant qubit, once it can do fault-tolerant two-qubit gates with an error of ~10-6". That's two logical qubits. The general consensus is that to have a practically useful quantum computer we'd need one with about a million physical Qubits. That's not just 1,000 of these 105 qubit chips because those wouldn't be entangled, but one chip with about a million entangled physical qubits and therefore 1,000 logical qubits.
victor22 2y ago
Will I be attacked for thinking this is at least fishy? or are they just being ultra secretive. They never talk about what this computer is actually doing.
- cubefox 2y ago
  Even Scott Aaronson doesn't really know what they will be good for. Something something quantum simulation something something material science, perhaps. Yet nothing concrete, no example of a problem that they would actually solve. Apart from cracking RSA, which is the opposite of useful. It seems the whole quantum computer thing only made people like him excited because it's a different kind of computer, not because there is any strong evidence that it will be practically useful. It reminds me of nuclear fusion: Sounds cool, but it is highly doubtful whether it could ever compete economically with nuclear fission.
- simonh 2y ago
  They did a test of pretty much the only thing it can do. This is an extremely limited system, different in capability but in the grand scheme of things conceptually similar to implementing the quantum equivalent of a single binary digit.
Jasondells 2y ago
While these advancements in quantum error correction are undeniably impressive, I can't help but feel a sense of déjà vu here.... reminds me of the decades of "breakthroughs" in fusion energy—always promising to change the world, but perpetually just out of reach. The Google benchmark with random circuit sampling is fascinating from a theoretical perspective, but it’s hard to see how this translates into solving problems that matter outside the quantum research community. The lack of practical applications is a glaring issue. Sure, it's cool that Willow can outperform Frontier on this obscure task, but where’s the real-world impact? Cryptography, optimization, drug discovery—these are the kinds of problems quantum computing needs to beat if it’s going to justify the investment. Until that happens, it feels like we’re stuck in a cycle of overpromising and underdelivering, with flashy press releases but no tangible results. And let’s talk about scalability. Even if Willow hits the error-correction frontier, the number of physical qubits needed to build a truly practical quantum computer seems astronomical. Millions of qubits just to factor a number? It’s hard to see how this scales in a way that makes economic or scientific sense. Right now, it feels like quantum computing is a field for researchers who are okay with not seeing practical outcomes in their lifetimes. Maybe I’m too cynical, but this smells like another example of tech marketing getting ahead of the science. Maybe we can admit that we’re still decades away from quantum computing having any real-world relevance?
Ham121 2y ago
Google Willow is an exciting step forward in technology! The potential for it to transform how we interact with and integrate AI into our daily lives is incredible. I am curious to learn more about its real-world applications and how it will improve accessibility and efficiency across various domains. Kudos to the team for pushing boundaries and innovating looking forward to seeing whats next!

763 points by Bootvis 2y ago

Summary: Its a real result, the cool part is more qubits seem to live longer rather than shorter, bad part the results are not explicitly verifiable, only through extrapolation

NooneAtAll3 2y ago
you're mixing up 2 different results a) error-correction needs small level of errors to begin with to amplify signal - we finally got to that point, and larger correction setup deals with more errors b) "standard" benchmark problem now 100% computes something uncomputable with classic chips (in practice) - the problem is that it's so quantum, neither it is verifiable with classic chips anymore

mupuff1234 2y ago

I just want to know if the stock movement is justified or not.

Vecr 2y ago
Stock movements aren't generally justified.
crazygringo 2y ago
Oh wow it was up 6.2% at one point this morning from yesterday, now 4.6%.
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dboreham 2y ago
You never know the reason for a stock move. Could be that people see Oracle's poor results today as reason GCP will make more money.
- crazygringo 2y ago
  If you're a journalist and simply phone a few institutional investors who make up the bulk of this kind of trading and with who you have a trusting relationship, they'll tell you. If they all mostly agree, that's your answer. And it's almost always what you assumed anyways from the news, because this stuff isn't rocket science. So for all practical purposes, yes actually you usually do know, whenever a stock movement is large enough that it's clearly outside the normal noise of day trading. I mean, can you prove the reason with 100% mathematical certainty? No. But can you be 99% sure? Of course.
praptak 2y ago
I want the ability to answer such questions with an accuracy slightly over 50%.
- amoss 2y ago
  return false
melvinmelih 2y ago
Depends on which universe you're talking about.
vasco 2y ago
You don't need a quantum computer to know everything from now until the end of times has already been priced in.

aeternum 2y ago

>it would also take ~10^25 years for a classical computer to directly verify the quantum computer’s results!! This claim makes little sense. There are many problems that are much easier to verify than to solve. Why isn't that approach ever used to validate these quantum computing claims?

svachalek 2y ago
I think he was making that exact point in this blog.
aidenn0 2y ago
Right, Factoring and discrete logs both come to mind; is Google's quantum computer not able to achieve measurable speedups on those versus classical computation?
- fastball 2y ago
  Google's chip is not general enough to perform any quantum algorithm.
  - tmvphil 2y ago
    It is perfectly general, but the error rate is too high to operate all qubits simultaneously for more than a few tens of gates without error. This is why error correction is needed but then you need orders of magnitude more physical qubits to deal with the overhead.
    - fastball 2y ago
      Then why can they perform an RCS evaluation but not some other algo? RCS requires the least number of qubits by a huge margin?
      - drkevorkian 2y ago
        No, not quite, it's about the error-per-gate. RCS has very loose requirements on the error per gate, since all they need is enough gates to build up some arbitrary entangled state (a hundred or so gates on this system). Other algorithms have very tight requirements on the error-per-gate, since they must perform a very long series of operations without error.

ChrisArchitect 2y ago

Related: Willow, Our Quantum Chip https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42367649 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42367649

01HNNWZ0MV43FF 2y ago

> No doubt people will ask me what this means for superconducting qubits versus trapped-ion or neutral-atom or photonic qubits, I only wonder what it means for cryptography. The letters "crypt" don't appear in the text.

Filligree 2y ago
Nothing, yet.
NooneAtAll3 2y ago
quantum computing is entering "middle-late 1930s" - it's still quite some time away from Turing&Enigma moment but it already passed "1920s" with "only radios" - analog, non-digital devices stability tech is almost here (check quanta magazine), next is the scaling up
- adastra22 2y ago
  As noted in the article, it could be a very sharp transition from "largest factorization performed so far is 3x7=21" to "we can factor real-world RSA." If you want to make a classical computing analogy, it's like we're struggling to make transistors with more than a single 9 of reliability, and obviously you can't do complex computation with a circuit where every step gives garbage 1-in-10 times. Except it's not's obvious. 90% reliability could probably be made to work with silicon transistors with bog standard error correcting logic at the hardware level. Quantum error is a little bit more troublesome to work with, but there are also no known theoretical reasons error correction wouldn't work at existing error rates. We just need better algorithms, which might very well exist. Or, the next generation of chips would offer more 9's reliability, and even with existing error correction just a few more sigma in reliability would put us over the tipping point of being able to make reliable large-scale systems.
- fluoridation 2y ago
  There were mechanical computers before the 20th century that had more complexity (in terms of total information) and were more useful than quantum computers are.

blast 2y ago

Damn he's funny. For 20 years I’ve been trying to teach the world how to fish in Hilbert space, but (sigh) I suppose I’ll just hand out some more fish.

munchler 2y ago

The argument in favor of the Everettian multiverse (“where else could the computation have happened, if it wasn’t being farmed out to parallel universes?”) seems illogical to me. Aren't these parallel universes running the same computation at the same time, and thus also "farming out" part of their computations to us? If so, it's a zero-sum game, so how could there be an overall performance gain for all the universes?

Filligree 2y ago
That's not really how MWI works. There isn't some fixed number of universes; actually, there aren't really distinct universes (or timelines) at all. Attempting to count them is about like trying to measure the length of a coastline; they blend together once you zoom far enough in. Running the quantum computer causes 'new timelines' to be created. Though so would ordinary atoms just sitting there; the tricky thing about quantum computers is making it so the split is temporary. So the quantum computer gets split into multiple versions of itself, does some computation in each, and merges the results. This isn't map-reduce; there's a strictly limited set of ways in which you can do the merger, all of which are weird from a classical perspective. You can argue for MWI based on this, because the computations that got merged still had to happen somewhere. It's incompatible with Copenhagen, more so the bigger and longer-lasting the computation gets. It's not, strictly speaking, incompatible with pilot wave theory; but pilot wave theory is MWI plus an additional declaration that "Here, you see this timeline here? That's the real one, all the others are fake. Yes, all the computation needed to instantiate them still happens, but they lack the attribute of being real." Though that makes PWT incompatible with computationalism, and hence with concepts such as mind-uploading. Which is a bullet you can choose to bite, of course...
- munchler 2y ago
  Thank you. This makes sense.
- monero-xmr 2y ago
  I’d prefer to say we just go back in time the moment it collapses. How can you disagree with me? No proof of anything and we can all contrive untestable solutions. No wait, it’s actually God who exists in the wave collapse, and His divine intervention does the computation.

JKCalhoun 2y ago

What does quantum computing need to move forward? Will just throwing a lot of money at the thing allow it to scale? Or are there fundamental problems blocking it that require new physics or new material sciences?

ryandamm 2y ago
I was told by a Microsoft researcher that it will unlock currently unsolvable problems in chemistry, weather modeling, materials science, fusion and plasma physics, drug development… the list went on but it was really long. Most advances he cited would result from improved simulations, iirc. I don’t recall enough of the conversation (circa 2019) to remember anything about the properties of the problems it helps solve, so I can’t help generalize. Sorry.
- gauge_field 2y ago
  Here is a perspective from another MS researcher: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WY3htdKUGsA&t=1564s&ab_channel=SimonsInstitute https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WY3htdKUGsA&t=1564s&ab_chann... Essentially, they argue that unless strong algorithmic breakthrough happens (e.g. having cubic speedup, instead of quadratic), the only practical problem for which quantum computer will be useful, are those where you get exponential speed up:simulation of quantum systems (and breaking of RSA encyrption if you count that). Even those are challenged by other (approximate) simulation by Classical Deep Learning. There will be some quantum models for which quantum supremacy will be useful and Deep Learning wont. The question what classes of systems.
EvgeniyZh 2y ago
It's hard to say. For example the Google's paper talks about some rare (once an hour) strong errors. Are they fundamental or have some easy fix? We don't know. One obvious problem is cooling. We can't cool million qubits in a single fridge, so we will need to split them between fridges and communicate. Also, the wiring is really complicated already and hard to scale (one reason IBM has heavy hex is to have more space). Another problem is connectivity. For transmon qubits connectivity is fixed. Applying gate to two far qubits requires a lot of swaps, which is expensive. This is less of a problem for ions or cold atoms because they can couple any two qubits; but they likely wouldn't be able to for large amount of qubits. Another thing is classical control, because the classical data needs to be processed at high speed. Some companies develop specialized hardware for that. None of these is necessarily fundamental, but these problems need to be solved, in addition to usual scaling (it is hard to manufacture these devices and it becomes harder with each qubit).

daft_pink 2y ago

I just want to know when this thing is going to put me out of work forever with it’s insane and crazy math skills.

talldayo 2y ago
I don't think it has crazy math skills at all. That's what classical computing is really good at - give it a problem of arbitrary length and a computer should be able to string together instructions to yield you a sum. Quantum computing, especially right now, is simply focused on getting reliable input/output idempotency. It will be a really long time before it has insane and crazy math skills, and when it does, traditional CPU architectures will probably outperform it. TL:DR - if the Texas Instrument calculator didn't put you out of a job, neither will quantum computers.
- eastbound 2y ago
  Aren’t matrix calculations a perfect field for quantum computing? i.e. AI would progress extremely fast, wouldn’t it?
  - tmvphil 2y ago
    No, not really. There is no speed up for general matrix multiply, and generally it won't be practical for any problem with large amounts of input and output data. Closest thing is HHL algorithm for solving big linear systems, which requires a bunch of caveats on the matrix, and even then, it needs to be a subroutine of another quantum algorithm, since it outputs a quantum state, and not the full vector.
bawolff 2y ago
Unless your job involves factoring numbers into primes (or a few other limited math problems) probably never.
galaxyLogic 2y ago
There's two great lanes of progress happening in engineering these days: 1. Quantum Computing, and 2. AI. If they can find some synergies between the two, that could be THE major development. Make better AI by using Quantum Computers, and make better Quantum Computers by applying AI.

machina_ex_deus 2y ago

Before invoking parallel universes, how about comparing the system to nature's mind-boggling number of particles in the macroscopic world? A single gram contains 10^23=2^76 particles. Google's random circuit sampling experiment used only 67 qubits, Which is still order of magnitude below 76. I wonder why, the chip had 105 qubits and the error correction experiment used 101 qubits. Did Google's experiment encounter problems when trying to run RCS on the full 105 qubits device? Before saying that the computation invoked parallel universes, first I'd like to see that the computation couldn't be explained by the state being encoded classically by the state of the particles in the system.

zh3 2y ago
Somehow the universe knows how to organise the sand in an egg timer to form an orderly pile. Simulating that with a classical computer seems impossible - yet the universe "computes" the correct result in real time. It feels like there is a huge gap between what actually happens and what can be done with a computer (even a quantum one).
- onlyrealcuzzo 2y ago
  > Somehow the universe knows how to organise the sand in an egg timer to form an orderly pile. Simulating that with a classical computer seems impossible Is it really? There's only ~500,000 grains of sand in an egg timer. I don't know anything here, but this seems like something that shouldn't be impossible. So I'm curious. Why is this impossible? What am I missing?
  - GeneralMayhem 2y ago
    The real issue is that the sand isn't orderly sorted. At a micro level, it's billions and trillions of individual interactions between atoms that create the emergent behavior of solid grains of sand packing reasonably tightly but not phasing through each other.
  - zh3 2y ago
    Maybe it's not that hard to simulate, but let's start with looking at just two of the sand grains that happen to hit each other? They collide, how they rebound is all angles, internal structure, Young's modulus, they have electrostatic interactions, even the Van der Walls force come into play. Sand grains aren't regular, consider how determining the precise point at which two irregular objects collide is quite a challenge (and this isn't even a game, approximations to save compute time won't do what the real world does 'naturally'). So while we can - for something as simple and regular as an eggtimer - come up with some workable approximations, the approximation would surely fall short when it comes to the detail (an analytical solution for the path of every single grain).

Cataleya 2y ago

[flagged]

dataflow 2y ago

Dumb question: can someone explain the following? Imagine a ball falling on the ground. Simulating the O(10^23) atoms in each one with a classical computer would take (say) 10^23 times the amount of work of simulating a single atom. Depending on the level of detail, that could easily take, you know, many, many years... We don't call the ball a supercomputer or a quantum computer just because it's so much more efficient than a classical computer here. I presume that's because it can't do arbitrary computation this quickly, right? So in what way are these quantum computers different? Can they do arbitrary computations?

qnleigh 2y ago
Great question. The device is fully programable. Arbitrary one-qubit operations and arbitrary two-qubit operations between adjacent qubits can be performed. Theoretically these are 'universal for computation', meaning that a large enough device could compute anything computable. You can't program Quantum Tetris or whatever on a bouncy ball :). But nevertheless, many of these 'beyond-classical' demonstrations feel a bit arbitrary in the way you describe, and there's good reason for this. Logical operations are still quite noisy, and the more you apply, the more output quality degrades. To get the most 'beyond-classical,' you run the thing that maps most readily to the physical layout and limitations of the hardware. As things improve, we'll see more and more demonstrations of actually useful computations. Google and others have already performed lots of quantum simulations. In the long run, you will use quantum error correction, which is the other big announcement this week.
- dataflow 2y ago
  Thank you!
- fluoridation 2y ago
  So isn't this the same as turning a classical computer on and letting it run on whatever garbage is on the RAM at that time, and when some nonsense shows up on the screen breathlessly exclaim that it would take several millennia to get the same result with an abacus, despite the fact that something was "computed" only by strict adherence to the definition of the word? It's not like it takes a quantum computer to produce a meaningless stream of data.

TZubiri 2y ago

[flagged]

refulgentis 2y ago
> Anyone can write about quantum computers as if they are remotely qualified He's the quantum guy. [^2] You're applying classical computing intuitions (where verification is indeed usually much faster than computation) to quantum computing, where this relationship doesn't necessarily hold. The fact that verification can be as hard as computation in quantum computing is actually a major challenge that Aaronson has written about extensively. n.b. I've been here 15 years but sometimes have to take a step back and adjust my approach, because I can use this as a quick break to let out frustration with something else. When I do, I find the HN guidelines helpful, almost a joy. [^1] They're written conversationally and are more meditations than rules. [^1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html > Be kind. Don't be snarky. [...] Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive. "Other threads in these comments talk about some rick and morty multiverse type of thing, just stay on the sidelines guys" > Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something. "Anybody can write about quantum computers as if they are remotely qualified" > Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. From Aaronson's actual post: "...for the exact same reason why this quantum computation would take ~10^25 years for a classical computer to simulate, it would also take ~10^25 years for a classical computer to directly verify the quantum computer's results!!" He goes on: "...this is why I've been obsessing for years about the need to design efficiently verifiable near-term quantum supremacy experiments." [^2] • Received the [2020 ACM Prize in Computing](https://awards.acm.org/about/2020-acm-prize https://awards.acm.org/about/2020-acm-prize) for groundbreaking contributions to quantum computing • [ACM Fellow (2019)](https://www.acm.org/media-center/2019/december/fellows-2019 https://www.acm.org/media-center/2019/december/fellows-2019) for contributions to quantum computing and computational complexity • Named [Simons Investigator (2017)](https://www.simonsfoundation.org/mathematics-physical-sciences/simons-investigators/simons-investigators-awardees/ https://www.simonsfoundation.org/mathematics-physical-scienc...) • Won the [Alan T. Waterman Award (2012)](https://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=123406 https://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=123406), NSF's most prestigious young researcher award • Received [Presidential Early Career Award](https://www.nsf.gov/awards/PECASE/recip_details.jsp?pecase_id=261 https://www.nsf.gov/awards/PECASE/recip_details.jsp?pecase_i...) for Scientists and Engineers (2009) • Awarded [Sloan Research Fellowship](https://news.mit.edu/2009/sloan-fellows-0217 https://news.mit.edu/2009/sloan-fellows-0217) (2009) • Won multiple Best Student Paper Awards: - Danny Lewin Best Paper at [STOC](https://www.sigact.org/prizes/student.html https://www.sigact.org/prizes/student.html) for quantum computing proofs in local search (2004) - Best Paper at [Complexity Conference](https://computationalcomplexity.org/conferences.php https://computationalcomplexity.org/conferences.php) for quantum advice limitations (2004) - Best Paper at Complexity Conference for quantum certificate complexity (2003)

nsxwolf 2y ago

Man, reading this makes me feel so small. Being a "software engineer" consuming APIs and updating database rows seems laughably childish compared to whatever the hell it is I just read. I can't even imagine why I should bother trying to understand it. It's completely inaccessible. Only an elite few get to touch these machines.

arresin 2y ago
I had exactly the same thought. I read it after struggling for hours, making notes, etc, with a very hard (to me) part of my code and it made it seem pretty trivial.
gist 2y ago
Anything that someone else does that you don't understand or can't do always sounds super important, impressive, and enviable. Usually. But you have to realize that he spends his life doing and thinking about this. And will stipulate he's gifted in this area. I've never heard of him but managed to download his CV. I will also note that sometimes when I read HN links and think one thing then read the comments and people know enough to take issue with what is being said and even call it out.
brailsafe 2y ago
> I can't even imagine why I should bother trying to understand it. Well, maybe you should just try for the hell of it and see how far you get? Becoming fit seems impossible to a morbidly obese 45 y.o, and it is if that person's expectation is unreasonable, but if they just change it to be more reasonable, break it down into manageable routines, then they can get somewhere eventually. Find some papers, fill many gaps, dedicate a few years in your spare time, in 6 months you'll be 6 months closer than you were. Whether there's a reason or not, idk, it's something to do, be curious. Don't forget that by dedicating their life to something, they're naturally not dedicating their life to other things, things that you might be able to do, like climbing mountains, making pizza, or coming up with witty banter in social situations.
- rkp8000 2y ago
  MSR has a very clear and accessible tutorial on quantum computing for anyone interested in getting up to speed with the fundamentals: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F_Riqjdh2oM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F_Riqjdh2oM .

joak 2y ago

The hardware is progressing, we have a issue though: we don't have algorithms to run on quantum computers. Besides Shor's algorithm, useful to break RSA, we have nothing. Just vague ideas like: it could be useful for quantum simulations or optimisation or maybe ... If tomorrow we have a full running quantum computing what would we run on it? We are in a vacuum. The only hope is a breakthrough in quantum algorithms. Nothing in sight, not much progress on this side. Oh yes, Zapata Computing, the best funded company in quantum algorithms just went under this year.

phoronixrly 2y ago
Sorry but you need to cite some sources... The fact that random adtech devs on HN have no algorithms useful to them to run on a QC does not mean much to me.
- reikonomusha 2y ago
  No-nonsense roll-up of what algorithms a quantum computer can run in principle, along with their big-O speed ups (which don't necessarily reflect practical speed ups): https://quantumalgorithmzoo.org/ https://quantumalgorithmzoo.org/
- griomnib 2y ago
  You’ve provided me with a beautiful framing to understand some of the most obtuse and self-serving arguments I see on here: “random adtech devs”.
  - TZubiri 2y ago
    laugh as we may, they get the money.
- gauge_field 2y ago
  Here is another paper about its applicability on a range of problems: https://cacm.acm.org/research/disentangling-hype-from-practicality-on-realistically-achieving-quantum-advantage/#R12 https://cacm.acm.org/research/disentangling-hype-from-practi...

bambax 2y ago

> Having said that, the biggest caveat to the “10^25 years” result is one to which I fear Google drew insufficient attention. Namely, for the exact same reason why (as far as anyone knows) this quantum computation would take ~10^25 years for a classical computer to simulate, it would also take ~10^25 years for a classical computer to directly verify the quantum computer’s results!! I don't understand that part, can someone explain? There should be plenty of problems that take a long time to solve, but are trivial to verify? Like for example factoring extremely large numbers that are the product of a few very large primes? Maybe not on the order of 10^25 years, but still?

refulgentis 2y ago
This computation is... handwaves, most handwaving I've done in a while...initializing a random state, and it's well-understood whether this state was randomly initialized isn't computable in a reasonable timeframe on classical computers. ends extreme handwaving This nerd sniped a bunch of us, because it sounds like "oh we proved P!=NP", the keys to understanding are A) hanging onto the this in "this computation" (this is easier when you're familiar with the computation and it's contextual history in the field) B) remembering prime factors as a plausible application of QC. Then faced with the contradiction of B, it's neatly resolved by "yes, but the quantum computer isn't big enough to do prime factorization yet" As noted somewhat sideways in the blog, if someone has a computation that is A) not classically computable in a reasonable timeframe B) is computable on a miniscule quantum computer C) can be verified on a classic computer in a reasonable timeframe, a lot of researchers will be excited.
- jl6 2y ago
  Does this mean that the problem of not being able to verify QC results will go away in the scenario where we have a large enough QC to solve an NP problem?
  - refulgentis 2y ago
    Correct, you nailed it. FWIW: There were some really cool comments on the last article re: Willow. One of them being, a reference to a apparently well-known "roadmap" of quantum scaling that apparently got written up a few years back. Apparently the Willow result was the 2026 baseline projection. So their message was "well...not too big a deal, we achieved 2026 at ~2025." Also said that the same roadmap would have that achieved in 15-20 years.

flkenosad 2y ago

Could bitcoin miners use this to "guess" the next block?

LZ_Khan 2y ago
Yes, but I'm pretty sure the moment this is achieved bitcoin's price will collapse. And the investment required to produce such a machine is undoubtedly in the XX billions.
- TZubiri 2y ago
  "Yes, but I'm pretty sure the moment this is achieved bitcoin's price will collapse." Not necessarily. There's two interpretations to the question: 1. QC would be very efficient and mine efficiently. 2. QC would break SHA and would be able to reverse the hashing function at O(1). In scenario 1. The difficulty would increase. The mining rate globally always stays the same. And the voting power would be distributed amongst the holders of the new compute, this has happened before with ASICs. Usually there's some graduality to it, and the capital is distributed so that there is never a 51% monopoly. It's especially relevant how big the jump is, if the new computer is stronger than all of the existing miners combined, then they get 100% theoretically (although with malice). In that case there would probably be a fork or as you put it, BTC would collapse. However, if you have that power, holding BTC is probably not that important anyway. The actual compute is worth more. On scenario 2. Yes BTC would crash, but then again the actual compute power would be more impactful. BTC would crash but so would encryption, and planes and the world.
  - Solvitieg 2y ago
    > BTC would crash but so would encryption, and planes and the world. Sad to see Bitcoin advocates use this dismissive argument. Centralized systems will update their software as the threat increases. Meanwhile, there are no serious proposals for a quantum-resistance Bitcoin. Some are estimating the update will require a hard fork and take 1 year to update.
    - 2y ago

bradleyjg 2y ago

The problem it solved would take a septillion years to do on a conventional computer but no one other than a quantum researcher cares about that problem. How about solving a problem someone that’s not a quantum researcher would care about. Give me traveling salesmen with n=10. Or factor a 10 digit number. Something. Until then quantum computers are in the same category as commercial fusion. Long on “breakthroughs”, zero on results. Look at cancer researchers for a nice contrast. The annual number of “breakthrough that could cure cancer!1!” announcements have dropped to near zero while steady, real progress is being made all the time.

asdasdsddd 2y ago
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kccqzy 2y ago
Google says the next step is to find a problem with real life application. From https://blog.google/technology/research/google-willow-quantum-chip/ https://blog.google/technology/research/google-willow-quantu... > The next challenge for the field is to demonstrate a first "useful, beyond-classical" computation on today's quantum chips that is relevant to a real-world application.
- simpaticoder 2y ago
  I always assumed the obvious application was for Google to make a QaaS (Quantum as a Service) for factoring large primes. One obvious big customer would be intellegence agencies, especially the NSA.
  - thehappypm 2y ago
    Can you imagine? Send us a number, we send you the factors. And a bill. With lots of zeroes
  - ilya_m 2y ago
    The only problem with this business model is that once you factored one number, you kill your market - people will stop using pre-quantum crypto. (The obvious retort is that NSA would have harvested a ton of RSA/EC-encrypted traffic by then and would keep cracking ciphers going back decades. Unfortunately, old secrets is a rapidly depreciating asset class.)

urbandw311er 2y ago

> No doubt people will ask > me what this means for > superconducting qubits > versus trapped-ion or > neutral-atom or > photonic qubits I laughed at this. If I understood more than literally 2 words of that, then yes - no doubt I would ask about that.

andyferris 2y ago
It’s the implementation of the quantum computer - what are the qubits and gates and things made of? It is like we are still figuring out whether it’s better to use vacuum tubes or semiconductors or what. Google used superconducting circuits for Willow, which can be fabricated with computer-chip-style lithography etc, but needs to be kept extremely cold and the connectivity is obviously etched permanently into the circuit. Other technologies have different pros and cons.
- urbandw311er 2y ago
  Thank you, much appreciated

devit 2y ago

Where's the performance on common useful tasks? What's the largest number it can factor using Shor's algorithm? What's the largest hash it can compute a pre-image for using Grover's algorithm?

sgt101 2y ago
I think the record for Shor's remains at 15.

krick 2y ago

Surprisingly sparse on actual information considering all this humble-bragging (actually, not even so humble) about how he was teaching peasants to catch fish for 20 years, to be forced yet again to hand it out with his own bare hands! Well, he didn't hand out much. The post reiterates some facts from the original statement, which are pretty vague for most, I believe. The only useful clarification is that simulation results are indeed unverifiable, lol (as some might have suspected, but still nice to have a definitive confirmation from somebody who is supposedly an expert on this). Then it addresses the cringeworthy "Everettian multiverse" statement discussion. Granted, it indeed was one of the most discussed things on the previous thread, but I have honestly assumed that it's so obviously moot that one can simply ignore it. Everyone knows that at least one of top-3 threads on HN comments must be either a lame joke or some sort of bikeshedding argument. And that's pretty much it. "This blogger said this usual generic words, that reporter asked for an interview, but I declined, also, kudos to Google team for amazing work, it's unclear if it's any good, but it surely isn't bad!" Uh, ok, thanks for the clarification, man. I get it that this post was written in a hurry, but given all that "fish-handing" stuff and all these commenters in this very thread complaining about how they don't know the difference between "trapped-ion or neutral-atom" qubits (as if this distinction was the very essence of the post, which author paid much more attention to than to his responses to NYT journalists) it just doesn't deliver. ...So, what did I expect? Well, I didn't expect anything, but let's state the obvious. Google's benchmark was to produce some very specific (and unverifiable) random distribution (which, BTW, he kinda says, but waaay less clearly than it could have been said). Obviously, nobody cares about that. Everyone cares about when they will be able to run Shor's algorithm on Google's Chip, and factor primes and deprecate RSA into oblivion. Obviously. Some may wonder why it's not possible to do it on that Willow thing, others may suspect that it may have something to do with the fact they need a ton of "physical" qubits to emulate logical qubits because of error-correction. Also, it is widely advertised, that the very thing that is special about Willow is vastly better (and somehow "more promising to scale") error-correction. So, what people really want from a generous and skillful fisherman is obviously some critical, appropriately-speculative, ELI5-style analysis of the updated state of the art. What does Willow have, what does it need to become practical, what are some realistic projections on when we can get there. Where is all of that? Where is the fucking fish?!

partloyaldemon 2y ago

"except now with the PR blitz from Sundar Pichai on down" I definitely read this first pass and thought 'damn the CEO is hitting its own quantum supercomputer with bug reports'. that's cold. It just came out.

man4 2y ago

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de6u99er 2y ago

IMHO, we're still a long way from anything truly useful. The problem Google used to demonstrate quantum supremacy feels more like a glorified random number generator. Even if quantum computers can generate results faster, processing and storing the data still takes a lot of time. It’s hard not to draw a parallel with claims about "instantaneous quantum communication," where entangled particles appear to defy the speed of light — it seems impressive at first, but the practical value remains unclear.

blharr 2y ago
Isn't instant communication impossible, even with entanglement?
- JeffAllen 2y ago
  I'ts not communication it's coordination of 2 (or more) entangled particles. (spooky action at a distance)

megamix 2y ago

This is how miracles work. They are just physical laws fast forward, I like how this explains the ancient miracles. So maybe our previous generations had access to these things and it was lost along the way.

chikere232 2y ago
You need more science
- megamix 2y ago
  Oh there's enough science here. But to understand if someone needs more science, we should reach the conclusion scientifically. Etc etc
rudi_mk 2y ago
> I like how this explains the ancient miracles ...which ancient miracles are you possibly alluding to here?

Sergii001 2y ago

It becomes more and more interesting

LikeBeans 2y ago

In simple terms, if I understand quantum computing, and please correct me if I'm wrong, the big benefit is parallel computing at a massive scale whereas classical computing is serial in nature. If yes likely both method are useful. But a very useful use case for quantum computing is AI training to create the models. Currently consumes a lot of GPUs but QC has nice chance to impact such a use case. Did I get it right?

batmansmk 2y ago
Ahaha! Read the subtitle of the blog, literally at the top: "If you take nothing else from this blog: quantum computers won't solve hard problems instantly by just trying all solutions in parallel."
panda-giddiness 2y ago
> the big benefit is parallel computing at a massive scale The problem with this line of reasoning is that, even though a quantum system might have many possible states, we only observe a single one of those states at the time of measurement. If you could somehow prepare a quantum system such that it encoded the N equally-likely solutions to your classical problem, you would still need to rerun that experiment (on average) N times to get the correct answer. Broadly speaking, quantum computing exploits the fact that states are entangled (and therefore correlated). By tweaking the circuit, you can make it so that incorrect solutions interfere destructively while the correct solution interferes constructively, making it more likely that you will measure the correct answer. (Of course this is all probabilistic, hence the need for quantum error correction.) But developing quantum algorithms is easier said than done, and there's no reason to think a priori that all classical problems can be recast in this manner.
- sgt101 2y ago
  I think that the big challenge is to recast any classical computations as quantum computations with a superpolynomial speedup. I think that all classical problems can be cast as quantum computations because quantum computation is just computation - I believe that one can implement a turning machine using quantum gates, so arbitrary computation is possible with quantum gates. The superpolynomial speedups are the thing.. I wonder if these will be limited to a class of computations that have no physical realization - just pure maths.

r33b33 2y ago

Can someone just give it to me straight: should I sell my crypto positions and move to stock indices and real estate? Yes or no? No nuance, just yes or no.

sgt101 2y ago
no not for the next 5 years for sure.
kimchidude 2y ago
Asking the real questions here. I got that ‘Google has been talking about Willow for ages, this isn’t new’ blah blah blah. The problem is the public only started talking about it yesterday.
LittleTimothy 2y ago
No. This is progress towards quantum computing but no where near progress towards a real practical quantum computer that could break Bitcoin's algorithms. If progress continues it could be an issue in the future, check back in next time Google publishes a paper.
Mistletoe 2y ago
No, won’t all your stocks and financial information be gone also? Also Willow can’t even factor 15=5x3 you are good for a very long time.

nuancebydefault 2y ago

>> But for anyone who wonders why I’ve been obsessing for years about the need to design efficiently verifiable near-term quantum supremacy experiments: well, this is why! We’re now deeply into the unverifiable regime that I warned about. Can anybody explain me why it is hard to find a problem that can be solved only by a basic quantum computer within a short timespan and can be easily verified by a normal computer? I thought there are so many algo's out there for which one direction is fast and the reverse takes ages.

thrance 2y ago

Still no real potential applications beyond factoring large integers (of dubious use) and doing some obscure quantum physics simulations. QC companies are selling quantum AI and quantum finance and other hand wavy stuff. Yet, I don't see any algorithms that has a proven advantage in these domains over classical ones running on clusters of GPUs.

r33b33 2y ago

Let's talk about things that actually matter - where to invest in post-quantum world? I'll keep this short. - Google’s Willow quantum chip significantly outpaces current supercomputers, solving tasks in minutes that would otherwise take billions of years. - Hypothesis: Accelerating advancements in tech and AI could lead to quantum supremacy arriving sooner than the 2030s, contrary to expert predictions. - Legacy banking systems, being centralized, could transition faster to post-quantum-safe encryption by freezing transfers, re-checking processes, and migrating to new protocols in a controlled manner. - Decentralized cryptocurrencies face bigger challenges:Hard forks are difficult to coordinate across a decentralized network. - Transitioning to quantum-safe algorithms could lead to longer transaction signatures and significantly higher fees, eroding trust in the system. - If quantum computers compromise current cryptography, tangible assets (e.g., real estate, stock indices) may retain more value compared to digital assets like crypto. Thoughts?

almostgotcaught 2y ago
Literally none of this is correct. > - Google’s Willow quantum chip significantly outpaces current supercomputers, solving tasks in minutes that would otherwise take billions of years. billions of years you say? Just what kinds of "computing tasks" we talkin about here?
- r33b33 2y ago
  Okay, explain why and how it is not correct then? I genuinely want to learn and figure out what is the truth and what is the best route of action when it comes to securing a portfolio.
  - simonh 2y ago
    Willow only implements one single error corrected logical Qubit, using over 100 physical qubits. So far the test they have done is only applicable to an extremely narrow problem domain, approaching the limit of how practically useless a problem domain can be. I may be exaggerating slightly. As Google's own team report "Google will only consider itself to have created a “true” fault-tolerant qubit, once it can do fault-tolerant two-qubit gates with an error of ~10-6". That's two logical qubits. The general consensus is that to have a practically useful quantum computer we'd need one with about a million physical Qubits. That's not just 1,000 of these 105 qubit chips because those wouldn't be entangled, but one chip with about a million entangled physical qubits and therefore 1,000 logical qubits.

victor22 2y ago

Will I be attacked for thinking this is at least fishy? or are they just being ultra secretive. They never talk about what this computer is actually doing.

cubefox 2y ago
Even Scott Aaronson doesn't really know what they will be good for. Something something quantum simulation something something material science, perhaps. Yet nothing concrete, no example of a problem that they would actually solve. Apart from cracking RSA, which is the opposite of useful. It seems the whole quantum computer thing only made people like him excited because it's a different kind of computer, not because there is any strong evidence that it will be practically useful. It reminds me of nuclear fusion: Sounds cool, but it is highly doubtful whether it could ever compete economically with nuclear fission.
simonh 2y ago
They did a test of pretty much the only thing it can do. This is an extremely limited system, different in capability but in the grand scheme of things conceptually similar to implementing the quantum equivalent of a single binary digit.

Jasondells 2y ago

While these advancements in quantum error correction are undeniably impressive, I can't help but feel a sense of déjà vu here.... reminds me of the decades of "breakthroughs" in fusion energy—always promising to change the world, but perpetually just out of reach. The Google benchmark with random circuit sampling is fascinating from a theoretical perspective, but it’s hard to see how this translates into solving problems that matter outside the quantum research community. The lack of practical applications is a glaring issue. Sure, it's cool that Willow can outperform Frontier on this obscure task, but where’s the real-world impact? Cryptography, optimization, drug discovery—these are the kinds of problems quantum computing needs to beat if it’s going to justify the investment. Until that happens, it feels like we’re stuck in a cycle of overpromising and underdelivering, with flashy press releases but no tangible results. And let’s talk about scalability. Even if Willow hits the error-correction frontier, the number of physical qubits needed to build a truly practical quantum computer seems astronomical. Millions of qubits just to factor a number? It’s hard to see how this scales in a way that makes economic or scientific sense. Right now, it feels like quantum computing is a field for researchers who are okay with not seeing practical outcomes in their lifetimes. Maybe I’m too cynical, but this smells like another example of tech marketing getting ahead of the science. Maybe we can admit that we’re still decades away from quantum computing having any real-world relevance?

Ham121 2y ago

Google Willow is an exciting step forward in technology! The potential for it to transform how we interact with and integrate AI into our daily lives is incredible. I am curious to learn more about its real-world applications and how it will improve accessibility and efficiency across various domains. Kudos to the team for pushing boundaries and innovating looking forward to seeing whats next!