22 ms·

Data manipulations alleged in study that paved way for Microsoft's quantum chip

218 points by EvgeniyZh 1y ago

krastanov 1y ago
This is such a beautiful theoretical idea (a type of "natural" error correction which protects the qubits without having to deal with the exorbitant overhead of error correcting codes). It is very disheartening and discouraging and just plain exhausting that there has been so much "data manipulation" in this subfield (see all the other retracted papers from the last 5 years mentioned in the article). I can only imagine how hard this must be on the junior scientists on the team who have been swept into it without much control.
- pc86 1y ago
  Hopefully people are keeping lists of the PIs on these redacted papers and keeping that in mind for future grants, hiring, etc. I know almost nobody is, but one can hope. Academic fraud ranging from plagiarism to outright faking data should, more often than not, make it basically impossible for you to get any academic job whatsoever, in your field or others. This chip is an extreme example, but potentially millions of dollars of productivity, hundreds or even thousands of people spending months or years on something based in a fabrication. The person or people directly responsible for this should never work again.
  - jakobgm 1y ago
    Totally agree! As with any behavior which is difficult to detect and often goes by unnoticed; the punishment should be large enough for the expected value of fraud being clearly net negative for those that might feel tempted at "tweaking some numbers". In case anybody else also isn't familiar with "PI" as an abbreviation in this context: > In many countries, the term principal investigator (PI) refers to the holder of an independent grant and the lead researcher for the grant project, usually in the sciences, such as a laboratory study or a clinical trial. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal_investigator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal_investigator
  - NoMoreNicksLeft 1y ago
    >Academic fraud ranging from plagiarism to outright faking data should, more often than not, make it basically impossible for you to get any academic job whatsoever, in your field or others. That might actually be a perverse incentive. If you've already nuked your career with some fraud, you can't make it worse by extra fraud... why ever stop? People inclined to do this sort of thing, when faced with that deterrent just double down and commit even more fraud, they figure the best that can be hoped for is to do it so much and so perfectly that they're never discovered. The trouble is that the system for science worked well when there exists only some tiny number of scientists, but now we're a planet of 8 billion and where people tell their children they have to go to college and get a STEM degree. Hell, you can only become a scientist by producing new research, even if there's not much left to research in your field. And the only way to maintain that position as a scientist is "to publish or perish". We have finite avenues of research with an ever-growing population of scientists, bullshit is inevitable.
    - dullcrisp 1y ago
      You stop because you can’t get a job?
    - pc86 1y ago
      Even if "bullshit is inevitable" is true -- I don't think it is -- that doesn't mean we shouldn't punish people who make up data, who steal others' work, who steal grant money by using their fake data to justify future grants. "Well there's lots of people now" is not really a great justification. You become a low trust society by allowing trust to deteriorate. That happens in part because you choose not to punish people who violate that trust in the first place.
      - NoMoreNicksLeft 1y ago
        >that doesn't mean we shouldn't punish people who make up data, I am not wishy-washy on punishment. A part of me that I do not deny nor suppress wants punishment for those who do wrong. But sometimes punishments are counter-productive. The easiest example is the death penalty for heinous, non-murder crimes. This incentivizes the rapist or child molester (or whatever) to kill the victim. You can't execute them twice, after all, so if they're already on the hook for a death penalty crime, murdering their victim also gets rid of a prime witness who could get them the death penalty by testifying, but without increasing the odds of the death penalty. "Career death penalty" here is like that. >"Well there's lots of people now" is not really a great justification. It wasn't meant to be a justification. It was an explanation of the problem, and (in part, at least) and attempt to show that things need to change if we want the fraud to go away. >You become a low trust society by allowing trust to deteriorate We've been a low trust society for a long time now. People need to start thinking about how to accomplish the long, slow process of changing a low trust society to a high trust one.
  - nextos 1y ago
    > Academic fraud ranging from plagiarism to outright faking data should, more often than not, make it basically impossible for you to get any academic job whatsoever, in your field or others. Sadly, the system is often rewarding fake or, especially, exaggerated/misrepresented data and conclusions. I think that a significant proportion of articles exaggerate findings and deliberately cherry-pick data. It's a market of lemons. Proving misrepresentation is really hard, and the rewards for doing so are immense. Publishing an article in Nature, Science, or Cell is a career-defining moment.
    - pc86 1y ago
      Yeah I agree it's not an easy problem to solve by any stretch. I'm not a professor or scientist so I won't pretend to understand the intricacies of journal publication and that sort of thing. But I do wonder when someone's PhD thesis gets published and it turns out they plagiarized large parts of it, why isn't their degree revoked? When someone is a professor at a prestigious institution and they fabricate data, why are they still teaching the following year?
      - nextos 1y ago
        Serious universities do often revoke doctoral degrees if plagiarism is proven. I've seen Oxford University going as far as demanding someone to issue a correction of a journal article to cite prior work because they were making some claims of novelty that were not true. > When someone is a professor at a prestigious institution and they fabricate data, why are they still teaching the following year? Internal politics. Committees judging potential misconduct are not independent. If you are sufficiently high up in the ladder, you can get away with many things. Sweden recently created a Swedish National Board for Assessment of Research Misconduct (Npof) to address this problem. I think this is a step in the right direction. But, ultimately, I think academic fraud should be judged in court. However, e.g. Leonid Schneider (forbetterscience.com) has been taken to court several times for reporting fraud, including fraud that led to patient death, and some judges didn't seem to care much about data fabrication / misrepresentation.
  - MeteorMarc 1y ago
    Or get rehabilitated, like Leo Kouwenhoven, see https://delta.tudelft.nl/article/gerehabiliteerde-kouwenhoven-keert-terug-naar-tu-delft https://delta.tudelft.nl/article/gerehabiliteerde-kouwenhove...
    - 77pt77 1y ago
      I missed the redemption.
  - mensetmanusman 1y ago
    This would be half of the nsf grants according to the replication crisis work.
christkv 1y ago
So the chip is a paperweight ?
- pelagicAustral 1y ago
  I propose everything is a paperweight until you show an implementation.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- nottorp 1y ago
  Its 5 years away, just like cold fusion and AI.
  - whynotmaybe 1y ago
    We've had cold fusion for years : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_ColdFusion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_ColdFusion And while searching for this silly joke, I'm now baffled by the fact that it's still alive !
    - nottorp 1y ago
      For every framework that ever existed there's somewhere out there a computer running it and doing real work with it, without any updates since autumn 1988, while the google wannabe solo founders worry about the best crutch^H^H^H^H tooling, their CI/CDs and not scaling.
russianGuy83829 1y ago
that's going to be a banger bobbybroccoli video
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
_heimdall 1y ago
Unpopular opinion I'm sure, but I very much quantum today as smoke and mirrors. I've tried to dive down that rabbit hole and I keep finding myself in a sea of theoretical mathematics that seems to fall into the "give me one miracle" category. I expect this won't be the last time we hear about quantum research that has been foundational to a lot of work turns out to have been manipulated, or designed poorly and unverified by other research labs.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- yesbut 1y ago
  It is all a scam. The research side is interesting for what it is, but the idea of having any type of useful "quantum computer" is sci-fi make believe. The grifters will keep stringing investors and these large corporations along for as long as possible. Total waste of resources.
  - roflmaostc 1y ago
    Why do you think so? Your words sounds like what people said in the 40s and 50s about computers.
    - skywhopper 1y ago
      Do you have any citations for that?
      - reaperducer 1y ago
        Do you have any citations for that? I'm not the OP, but when you're of a certain age, you don't need citations for that. Memory serves. And my family was saying those sorts of things and teasing me about being into computers as late as the 1970's.
        5123125123 1y ago
trentnix 1y ago
Looks like the end of the world has been delayed.
anonym29 1y ago
Microsoft's finest, ladies and gentlemen.
sschueller 1y ago
Sadly I have the feeling some people are starting to just "play" being scientists/engineers and not actually doing the real work anymore.
- 77pt77 1y ago
  MBA science. Only perception matters?
  - nathan_compton 1y ago
    "Fake it till you make it" was practically the motto of young scientists when I was matriculating. In fairness, I don't think they really meant "fake your research" but our entire incentive/competition based society encourages positive misrepresentation - you can't do science, good or bad, if you get competed out of the system entirely. Guy Debord wrote a book about what he called "The Society of the Spectacle," wherein he argues that capitalism, mostly by virtue of transforming objects into cash at the point of exchange, (that is, a person can take the money and run) tends to cause all things to become evacuated, reduced as much as possible to their image, rather than their substance. I believe even GK Chesterton understood this when he said that the purpose of a shovel is to dig, not to be sold, but that capitalism tends to see everything as something to be sold primarily and then as something to be used perhaps secondarily. There is some truth in all this, I think, though obviously the actual physical requirements of living and doing things place some restrictions on how far we can transform things into their images.
    - caseyy 1y ago
      "Fake it till you make it." has turned into "fake it." recently, and it seems to be working disturbingly well in society.
Panoramix 1y ago
Looking at the paper, cherry picking 5 out of 21 devices is in itself not a deal breaker IMO, but it's certainly something they should have disclosed. I bet this happens all the time with these kinds of exotic devices that take almost a year to manufacture only for a single misplaced atom to ruin the whole measurement. Average of positive and negative Vbias data and many other manipulations are hard to justify, this reeks of "desperate PhD needed to publish at all costs". Yet at the same time I wouldn't fully disqualify the findings, but make the conclusion a lot weaker "there might be something here". All in all, it's in Microsoft's interests that the data is not cooked. They can only ride on vaporware for so long. Sooner or later the truth will come out; and if Microsoft is burning a lot of cash to lie to everyone, the only loser will be Microsoft.
- darth_avocado 1y ago
  > cherry picking 5 out of 21 devices is in itself not a deal breaker IMO Might as well draw a straight line through a cloud of data points that look like a dog
  - crote 1y ago
    It's a physical device at the bleeding edge of capabilities. Defects are pretty much a guarantee, and getting a working sample is a numbers game. Is it really that strange to not get a 100% yield? Having 5 working devices out of 21 is normal. The problem is that the other 16 weren't mentioned.
    - darth_avocado 1y ago
      Well you also need to account for what kind of deviation are we talking about between the 21. If they selected the 5 because they were the best, but the others showed results that were within say 0-5% of the 5, then sure that is acceptable. But if we’re talking about flipping a coin 21 times, seeing heads 16 times and then choosing the 5 tails outcomes as the results, then I would say that’s pretty unacceptable.
      - 1y ago
6d6b73 1y ago
[flagged]
- dang 1y ago
  "Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something." "Don't be curmudgeonly. Thoughtful criticism is fine, but please don't be rigidly or generically negative." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
teekert 1y ago
Sabine was already skeptical in February [0]. Although to be fair, she usually is :) But in this field, I think it is warranted. [0]: https://backreaction.blogspot.com/2025/02/microsoft-exaggerates-quantum-computing.html https://backreaction.blogspot.com/2025/02/microsoft-exaggera...
- eqvinox 1y ago
  Sabine Hossenfelder has grown a little… controversial… lately. You should probably do some googling (or YouTube searching, in this case.) It's not entirely clear to me what's going on but some of her videos do raise serious question marks.
  - matkoniecz 1y ago
    can you be more specific what you are alleging? and little controversy is not automatically a problem or reason to discount/ignore someone anyway
    - immibis 1y ago
      She has a tendency to be wrong on things outside her domain of expertise. It's the classic being an expert in one field and thinking you're an expert in all of them.
      - dimal 1y ago
        Please give specific examples. I keep seeing vague comments like this about her, but very little in the way of specifics. Without specifics, this is just ad hominem rumor mongering.
        krastanov 1y ago
        Extreme specifics: her comments on work out of MIT on Color Center Qubits was basically "finally an example of actual progress in quantum computing because of reason A, B, C". That statement was in the class of "not even wrong" -- it was just complete non sequitur. People actually in the fields she comments on frequently laugh at her uninformed nonsense. In this particular case, the people that did the study she praised were also among the ones laughing at her.
os2warpman 1y ago
As far as I can tell the only thing >25 years of development into quantum computing implementations has resulted in is the prodigious consumption of helium-3. At least with fusion we've gotten some cool lasers, magnets, and test and measurement gear.
- krastanov 1y ago
  You are right about that (well, except all the progress in classical complexity theory and algorithms, cosmology, condensed matter physics, material science, and sensing, which stemmed from this domain). But, for the little it is worth, it took much longer between Babbage conceiving of a classical computer and humanity developing the technology to make classical computers reliable. Babbage died before it was possible to build the classical computers he invented.
  - os2warpman 1y ago
    If you are going to use Babbage as the start of the clock, we must use the mechanical and electromechanical logarithmic and analytical engines created in the late 1800s/early 1900s as the stop. We must also use 1980 as the year in which quantum computing was "invented". As far as progress goes, in all of those fields there are naught but papers that say "quantum computing would be totally rad in these fields" or simulations that are slower than classical computers. (by, like, a lot)
    - krastanov 1y ago
      There has been a programmable electromechanical computer build in the late 1800? Not just a simple calculator? Please share examples, this sounds awesome. Yes, late 1980s is when I would say quantum computing was conceived. I gave plenty of examples of positive outcomes thanks to quantum information science in my parenthetical. It is much more than the overhyped VC-funded vapor.
- Hasz 1y ago
  This kind of fundamental research though is absolutely worth it. For a fairly small amount of money (on the nation-state scale) you can literally change the world order. Same deal with fusion or other long-term research programs. Quantum computers are still in a hype bubble right now, but having a "real" functional one (nothing right now is close IMO) is a big a shift as nuclear energy or the transistor. Even if we don't get a direct result, ancillary research products can still be useful, as you mentioned with fusion.
chermi 1y ago
Based on the comments in this thread... Guys, Microsoft fuckery doesn't invalidate an entire field. I think certain VCs are a little too optimistic about quantum computing timelines, but that doesn't mean it's not steadily progressing. I saw a comment talking about prime factorization from 2001 with some claim that people haven't been working on pure quantum computing since then? It's really hard. It's still firmly academic, with the peculiar factor that much of it is industry backed. Google quantum was a UCSB research lab turned into a Google branch, while still being powered by grad students. You can begin to see how there's going to be some culture clash and unfortunate pressure to make claims and take research paths atypical of academia (not excusing any fraud, edit: also to be very clear, not accusing Google quantum of anything). It's a hard problem in a funky environment. 1) it's a really hard problem. Anything truly quantum is hard to deal with, especially if you require long coherence times. Consider the entire field of condensed matter (+ some amo). Many of the experiments to measure special quantum properties/confirm theories do so in a destructive manner - I'm not talking only about the quantum measurement problem, I'm talking about the probes themselves physically altering the system such that you can only get one or maybe a few good measurements before the sample is useless. In quantum computing, things need to be cold, isolated, yet still read/write accessible over many many cycles in order to be useful. 2) given the difficulty, there's been many proposals for how to meet the "practical quantum computer" requirement. This ranges from giving up on a true general purpose quantum computer (quantum annealers) to NV vacancies, neutral/ionic lattices, squid/Josephson based,photonic, hybrid system with mechanical resonators, and yeah, topological/anyon shit. 3) It's hard to predict what will actually work, so every approach is a gamble and different groups take different gambles. Some take bigger gambles than the others. Id say topological quantum was a pretty damn big gamble given how new the theory was. 4) Then you need to gradually build up the actually system + infrastructure, validating each subsystem then subsystem interactions and finally full systems. Think system preparation, system readout, system manipulation, isolation, gate design... Each piece of this could be multiple +/- physicist, ece/cse, me, CS PhDs + postdocs amount of work. This is deep expertise and specialization. 4) Then if one approach seems to work, however poorly*, you need to improve it, scale it. Scaling is not guaranteed. This will mean many more PhDs worth trying to improve subsystems. 5) again, this is really hard. Truly, purely quantum systems are very difficult to work with. Classical computing is built on transistors, which operate just fine at room temperature*(plenty of noise, no need for cold isolation) with macroscopic classical observables/manipulations like current, voltage. Yes, transistors work because of quantum effects, and with more recent transistors more directly use quantum effects (tunneling). For example, the "atomic" units of memory are still effectively macroscopic. The systems as a whole are very well described classically, with only practical engineering concerns related to putting things too close together, impurities, heat dissipation. Not to say that any of that is easy at all, but there's no question of principle like "will this even work?" * With a bunch of people on HN shitting on how poorly + a bunch of other people saying its a full blown quantum computer + probably higher ups trying to make you say it is a real quantum computer or something about quantum supremacy. *Even in this classical regime think how much effort went into redundancy and encoding/decoding schemes to deal with the very rare bit flips. Now think of what's needed to build a functioning quantum computer at similar scale No, I don't work in quantum computing, don't invest in it, have no stake in it.
devwastaken 1y ago
intellectual property is the entire point of modern tech. it doesnt matter if it doesnt work. they want the IP and sit on it. that way if someone else actually does the work they can claim they own it. repeal IP laws and regulate tech.
m101 1y ago
I bet you quantum computing will go the way of Newtonian physics - wrong and only proven so by our ability to measure things. It's as if Newton insisted that he was right despite the orbit of mercury being weird, and blaming his telescope. Physics is just a description of reality. If your business depends on reality being the same as the model, then you're going to have an expensive time.
- thrance 1y ago
  Uuh no? Quantum computing relies on some aspects of quantum physics, that at this point, have been thoroughly and extensively experimentally verified. If there are objections to quantum computing, and I believe there are many, those are to be found in questioning the capability of current engineering to build a quantum computer, or the usefulness of one if it could be built.
  - m101 1y ago
    As the old saying goes: the proof is in the pudding. And quantum computing has produced zero pudding. All hype, and zero pudding. When they actually do something useful (like the equivalent of general relativity and solving GPS), then we can see it as a useful theory.
    - Hilift 1y ago
      From 12 Years Ago: August 26, 2013 "In early May, news reports gushed that a quantum computation device had for the first time outperformed classical computers, solving certain problems thousands of times faster. The media coverage sent ripples of excitement through the technology community. A full-on quantum computer, if ever built, would revolutionize large swathes of computer science, running many algorithms dramatically faster, including one that could crack most encryption protocols in use today. "Over the following weeks, however, a vigorous controversy surfaced among quantum computation researchers. Experts argued over whether the device, created by D-Wave Systems, in Burnaby, British Columbia, really offers the claimed speedups, whether it works the way the company thinks it does, and even whether it is really harnessing the counterintuitive weirdness of quantum physics, which governs the world of elementary particles such as electrons and photons." https://metanexus.net/proof-quantum-pudding/ https://metanexus.net/proof-quantum-pudding/ https://spectrum.ieee.org/d-wave-quantum https://spectrum.ieee.org/d-wave-quantum
dreamcompiler 1y ago
When non-tech people ask me whether they should invest in quantum computing I tell them nobody alive today will live to see a return on their investment in quantum computing. Not because it's impossible but because the engineering challenges to make it truly useful outside the laboratory are too great, despite what the press releases would have you believe. I tell them the same thing about fusion energy.

218 points by EvgeniyZh 1y ago

This is such a beautiful theoretical idea (a type of "natural" error correction which protects the qubits without having to deal with the exorbitant overhead of error correcting codes). It is very disheartening and discouraging and just plain exhausting that there has been so much "data manipulation" in this subfield (see all the other retracted papers from the last 5 years mentioned in the article). I can only imagine how hard this must be on the junior scientists on the team who have been swept into it without much control.

pc86 1y ago
Hopefully people are keeping lists of the PIs on these redacted papers and keeping that in mind for future grants, hiring, etc. I know almost nobody is, but one can hope. Academic fraud ranging from plagiarism to outright faking data should, more often than not, make it basically impossible for you to get any academic job whatsoever, in your field or others. This chip is an extreme example, but potentially millions of dollars of productivity, hundreds or even thousands of people spending months or years on something based in a fabrication. The person or people directly responsible for this should never work again.
- jakobgm 1y ago
  Totally agree! As with any behavior which is difficult to detect and often goes by unnoticed; the punishment should be large enough for the expected value of fraud being clearly net negative for those that might feel tempted at "tweaking some numbers". In case anybody else also isn't familiar with "PI" as an abbreviation in this context: > In many countries, the term principal investigator (PI) refers to the holder of an independent grant and the lead researcher for the grant project, usually in the sciences, such as a laboratory study or a clinical trial. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal_investigator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal_investigator
- NoMoreNicksLeft 1y ago
  >Academic fraud ranging from plagiarism to outright faking data should, more often than not, make it basically impossible for you to get any academic job whatsoever, in your field or others. That might actually be a perverse incentive. If you've already nuked your career with some fraud, you can't make it worse by extra fraud... why ever stop? People inclined to do this sort of thing, when faced with that deterrent just double down and commit even more fraud, they figure the best that can be hoped for is to do it so much and so perfectly that they're never discovered. The trouble is that the system for science worked well when there exists only some tiny number of scientists, but now we're a planet of 8 billion and where people tell their children they have to go to college and get a STEM degree. Hell, you can only become a scientist by producing new research, even if there's not much left to research in your field. And the only way to maintain that position as a scientist is "to publish or perish". We have finite avenues of research with an ever-growing population of scientists, bullshit is inevitable.
  - dullcrisp 1y ago
    You stop because you can’t get a job?
  - pc86 1y ago
    Even if "bullshit is inevitable" is true -- I don't think it is -- that doesn't mean we shouldn't punish people who make up data, who steal others' work, who steal grant money by using their fake data to justify future grants. "Well there's lots of people now" is not really a great justification. You become a low trust society by allowing trust to deteriorate. That happens in part because you choose not to punish people who violate that trust in the first place.
    - NoMoreNicksLeft 1y ago
      >that doesn't mean we shouldn't punish people who make up data, I am not wishy-washy on punishment. A part of me that I do not deny nor suppress wants punishment for those who do wrong. But sometimes punishments are counter-productive. The easiest example is the death penalty for heinous, non-murder crimes. This incentivizes the rapist or child molester (or whatever) to kill the victim. You can't execute them twice, after all, so if they're already on the hook for a death penalty crime, murdering their victim also gets rid of a prime witness who could get them the death penalty by testifying, but without increasing the odds of the death penalty. "Career death penalty" here is like that. >"Well there's lots of people now" is not really a great justification. It wasn't meant to be a justification. It was an explanation of the problem, and (in part, at least) and attempt to show that things need to change if we want the fraud to go away. >You become a low trust society by allowing trust to deteriorate We've been a low trust society for a long time now. People need to start thinking about how to accomplish the long, slow process of changing a low trust society to a high trust one.
- nextos 1y ago
  > Academic fraud ranging from plagiarism to outright faking data should, more often than not, make it basically impossible for you to get any academic job whatsoever, in your field or others. Sadly, the system is often rewarding fake or, especially, exaggerated/misrepresented data and conclusions. I think that a significant proportion of articles exaggerate findings and deliberately cherry-pick data. It's a market of lemons. Proving misrepresentation is really hard, and the rewards for doing so are immense. Publishing an article in Nature, Science, or Cell is a career-defining moment.
  - pc86 1y ago
    Yeah I agree it's not an easy problem to solve by any stretch. I'm not a professor or scientist so I won't pretend to understand the intricacies of journal publication and that sort of thing. But I do wonder when someone's PhD thesis gets published and it turns out they plagiarized large parts of it, why isn't their degree revoked? When someone is a professor at a prestigious institution and they fabricate data, why are they still teaching the following year?
    - nextos 1y ago
      Serious universities do often revoke doctoral degrees if plagiarism is proven. I've seen Oxford University going as far as demanding someone to issue a correction of a journal article to cite prior work because they were making some claims of novelty that were not true. > When someone is a professor at a prestigious institution and they fabricate data, why are they still teaching the following year? Internal politics. Committees judging potential misconduct are not independent. If you are sufficiently high up in the ladder, you can get away with many things. Sweden recently created a Swedish National Board for Assessment of Research Misconduct (Npof) to address this problem. I think this is a step in the right direction. But, ultimately, I think academic fraud should be judged in court. However, e.g. Leonid Schneider (forbetterscience.com) has been taken to court several times for reporting fraud, including fraud that led to patient death, and some judges didn't seem to care much about data fabrication / misrepresentation.
- MeteorMarc 1y ago
  Or get rehabilitated, like Leo Kouwenhoven, see https://delta.tudelft.nl/article/gerehabiliteerde-kouwenhoven-keert-terug-naar-tu-delft https://delta.tudelft.nl/article/gerehabiliteerde-kouwenhove...
  - 77pt77 1y ago
    I missed the redemption.
- mensetmanusman 1y ago
  This would be half of the nsf grants according to the replication crisis work.

christkv 1y ago

So the chip is a paperweight ?

pelagicAustral 1y ago
I propose everything is a paperweight until you show an implementation.
deleted 1y ago
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nottorp 1y ago
Its 5 years away, just like cold fusion and AI.
- whynotmaybe 1y ago
  We've had cold fusion for years : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_ColdFusion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_ColdFusion And while searching for this silly joke, I'm now baffled by the fact that it's still alive !
  - nottorp 1y ago
    For every framework that ever existed there's somewhere out there a computer running it and doing real work with it, without any updates since autumn 1988, while the google wannabe solo founders worry about the best crutch^H^H^H^H tooling, their CI/CDs and not scaling.

russianGuy83829 1y ago

that's going to be a banger bobbybroccoli video

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

_heimdall 1y ago

Unpopular opinion I'm sure, but I very much quantum today as smoke and mirrors. I've tried to dive down that rabbit hole and I keep finding myself in a sea of theoretical mathematics that seems to fall into the "give me one miracle" category. I expect this won't be the last time we hear about quantum research that has been foundational to a lot of work turns out to have been manipulated, or designed poorly and unverified by other research labs.

deleted 1y ago
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yesbut 1y ago
It is all a scam. The research side is interesting for what it is, but the idea of having any type of useful "quantum computer" is sci-fi make believe. The grifters will keep stringing investors and these large corporations along for as long as possible. Total waste of resources.
- roflmaostc 1y ago
  Why do you think so? Your words sounds like what people said in the 40s and 50s about computers.
  - skywhopper 1y ago
    Do you have any citations for that?
    - reaperducer 1y ago
      Do you have any citations for that? I'm not the OP, but when you're of a certain age, you don't need citations for that. Memory serves. And my family was saying those sorts of things and teasing me about being into computers as late as the 1970's.
      - 5123125123 1y ago

trentnix 1y ago

Looks like the end of the world has been delayed.

anonym29 1y ago

Microsoft's finest, ladies and gentlemen.

sschueller 1y ago

Sadly I have the feeling some people are starting to just "play" being scientists/engineers and not actually doing the real work anymore.

77pt77 1y ago
MBA science. Only perception matters?
- nathan_compton 1y ago
  "Fake it till you make it" was practically the motto of young scientists when I was matriculating. In fairness, I don't think they really meant "fake your research" but our entire incentive/competition based society encourages positive misrepresentation - you can't do science, good or bad, if you get competed out of the system entirely. Guy Debord wrote a book about what he called "The Society of the Spectacle," wherein he argues that capitalism, mostly by virtue of transforming objects into cash at the point of exchange, (that is, a person can take the money and run) tends to cause all things to become evacuated, reduced as much as possible to their image, rather than their substance. I believe even GK Chesterton understood this when he said that the purpose of a shovel is to dig, not to be sold, but that capitalism tends to see everything as something to be sold primarily and then as something to be used perhaps secondarily. There is some truth in all this, I think, though obviously the actual physical requirements of living and doing things place some restrictions on how far we can transform things into their images.
  - caseyy 1y ago
    "Fake it till you make it." has turned into "fake it." recently, and it seems to be working disturbingly well in society.

Panoramix 1y ago

Looking at the paper, cherry picking 5 out of 21 devices is in itself not a deal breaker IMO, but it's certainly something they should have disclosed. I bet this happens all the time with these kinds of exotic devices that take almost a year to manufacture only for a single misplaced atom to ruin the whole measurement. Average of positive and negative Vbias data and many other manipulations are hard to justify, this reeks of "desperate PhD needed to publish at all costs". Yet at the same time I wouldn't fully disqualify the findings, but make the conclusion a lot weaker "there might be something here". All in all, it's in Microsoft's interests that the data is not cooked. They can only ride on vaporware for so long. Sooner or later the truth will come out; and if Microsoft is burning a lot of cash to lie to everyone, the only loser will be Microsoft.

darth_avocado 1y ago
> cherry picking 5 out of 21 devices is in itself not a deal breaker IMO Might as well draw a straight line through a cloud of data points that look like a dog
- crote 1y ago
  It's a physical device at the bleeding edge of capabilities. Defects are pretty much a guarantee, and getting a working sample is a numbers game. Is it really that strange to not get a 100% yield? Having 5 working devices out of 21 is normal. The problem is that the other 16 weren't mentioned.
  - darth_avocado 1y ago
    Well you also need to account for what kind of deviation are we talking about between the 21. If they selected the 5 because they were the best, but the others showed results that were within say 0-5% of the 5, then sure that is acceptable. But if we’re talking about flipping a coin 21 times, seeing heads 16 times and then choosing the 5 tails outcomes as the results, then I would say that’s pretty unacceptable.
    - 1y ago

6d6b73 1y ago

[flagged]

dang 1y ago
"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something." "Don't be curmudgeonly. Thoughtful criticism is fine, but please don't be rigidly or generically negative." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

teekert 1y ago

Sabine was already skeptical in February [0]. Although to be fair, she usually is :) But in this field, I think it is warranted. [0]: https://backreaction.blogspot.com/2025/02/microsoft-exaggerates-quantum-computing.html https://backreaction.blogspot.com/2025/02/microsoft-exaggera...

eqvinox 1y ago
Sabine Hossenfelder has grown a little… controversial… lately. You should probably do some googling (or YouTube searching, in this case.) It's not entirely clear to me what's going on but some of her videos do raise serious question marks.
- matkoniecz 1y ago
  can you be more specific what you are alleging? and little controversy is not automatically a problem or reason to discount/ignore someone anyway
  - immibis 1y ago
    She has a tendency to be wrong on things outside her domain of expertise. It's the classic being an expert in one field and thinking you're an expert in all of them.
    - dimal 1y ago
      Please give specific examples. I keep seeing vague comments like this about her, but very little in the way of specifics. Without specifics, this is just ad hominem rumor mongering.
      - krastanov 1y ago
        Extreme specifics: her comments on work out of MIT on Color Center Qubits was basically "finally an example of actual progress in quantum computing because of reason A, B, C". That statement was in the class of "not even wrong" -- it was just complete non sequitur. People actually in the fields she comments on frequently laugh at her uninformed nonsense. In this particular case, the people that did the study she praised were also among the ones laughing at her.

os2warpman 1y ago

As far as I can tell the only thing >25 years of development into quantum computing implementations has resulted in is the prodigious consumption of helium-3. At least with fusion we've gotten some cool lasers, magnets, and test and measurement gear.

krastanov 1y ago
You are right about that (well, except all the progress in classical complexity theory and algorithms, cosmology, condensed matter physics, material science, and sensing, which stemmed from this domain). But, for the little it is worth, it took much longer between Babbage conceiving of a classical computer and humanity developing the technology to make classical computers reliable. Babbage died before it was possible to build the classical computers he invented.
- os2warpman 1y ago
  If you are going to use Babbage as the start of the clock, we must use the mechanical and electromechanical logarithmic and analytical engines created in the late 1800s/early 1900s as the stop. We must also use 1980 as the year in which quantum computing was "invented". As far as progress goes, in all of those fields there are naught but papers that say "quantum computing would be totally rad in these fields" or simulations that are slower than classical computers. (by, like, a lot)
  - krastanov 1y ago
    There has been a programmable electromechanical computer build in the late 1800? Not just a simple calculator? Please share examples, this sounds awesome. Yes, late 1980s is when I would say quantum computing was conceived. I gave plenty of examples of positive outcomes thanks to quantum information science in my parenthetical. It is much more than the overhyped VC-funded vapor.
Hasz 1y ago
This kind of fundamental research though is absolutely worth it. For a fairly small amount of money (on the nation-state scale) you can literally change the world order. Same deal with fusion or other long-term research programs. Quantum computers are still in a hype bubble right now, but having a "real" functional one (nothing right now is close IMO) is a big a shift as nuclear energy or the transistor. Even if we don't get a direct result, ancillary research products can still be useful, as you mentioned with fusion.

chermi 1y ago

Based on the comments in this thread... Guys, Microsoft fuckery doesn't invalidate an entire field. I think certain VCs are a little too optimistic about quantum computing timelines, but that doesn't mean it's not steadily progressing. I saw a comment talking about prime factorization from 2001 with some claim that people haven't been working on pure quantum computing since then? It's really hard. It's still firmly academic, with the peculiar factor that much of it is industry backed. Google quantum was a UCSB research lab turned into a Google branch, while still being powered by grad students. You can begin to see how there's going to be some culture clash and unfortunate pressure to make claims and take research paths atypical of academia (not excusing any fraud, edit: also to be very clear, not accusing Google quantum of anything). It's a hard problem in a funky environment. 1) it's a really hard problem. Anything truly quantum is hard to deal with, especially if you require long coherence times. Consider the entire field of condensed matter (+ some amo). Many of the experiments to measure special quantum properties/confirm theories do so in a destructive manner - I'm not talking only about the quantum measurement problem, I'm talking about the probes themselves physically altering the system such that you can only get one or maybe a few good measurements before the sample is useless. In quantum computing, things need to be cold, isolated, yet still read/write accessible over many many cycles in order to be useful. 2) given the difficulty, there's been many proposals for how to meet the "practical quantum computer" requirement. This ranges from giving up on a true general purpose quantum computer (quantum annealers) to NV vacancies, neutral/ionic lattices, squid/Josephson based,photonic, hybrid system with mechanical resonators, and yeah, topological/anyon shit. 3) It's hard to predict what will actually work, so every approach is a gamble and different groups take different gambles. Some take bigger gambles than the others. Id say topological quantum was a pretty damn big gamble given how new the theory was. 4) Then you need to gradually build up the actually system + infrastructure, validating each subsystem then subsystem interactions and finally full systems. Think system preparation, system readout, system manipulation, isolation, gate design... Each piece of this could be multiple +/- physicist, ece/cse, me, CS PhDs + postdocs amount of work. This is deep expertise and specialization. 4) Then if one approach seems to work, however poorly*, you need to improve it, scale it. Scaling is not guaranteed. This will mean many more PhDs worth trying to improve subsystems. 5) again, this is really hard. Truly, purely quantum systems are very difficult to work with. Classical computing is built on transistors, which operate just fine at room temperature*(plenty of noise, no need for cold isolation) with macroscopic classical observables/manipulations like current, voltage. Yes, transistors work because of quantum effects, and with more recent transistors more directly use quantum effects (tunneling). For example, the "atomic" units of memory are still effectively macroscopic. The systems as a whole are very well described classically, with only practical engineering concerns related to putting things too close together, impurities, heat dissipation. Not to say that any of that is easy at all, but there's no question of principle like "will this even work?" * With a bunch of people on HN shitting on how poorly + a bunch of other people saying its a full blown quantum computer + probably higher ups trying to make you say it is a real quantum computer or something about quantum supremacy. *Even in this classical regime think how much effort went into redundancy and encoding/decoding schemes to deal with the very rare bit flips. Now think of what's needed to build a functioning quantum computer at similar scale No, I don't work in quantum computing, don't invest in it, have no stake in it.

devwastaken 1y ago

intellectual property is the entire point of modern tech. it doesnt matter if it doesnt work. they want the IP and sit on it. that way if someone else actually does the work they can claim they own it. repeal IP laws and regulate tech.

m101 1y ago

I bet you quantum computing will go the way of Newtonian physics - wrong and only proven so by our ability to measure things. It's as if Newton insisted that he was right despite the orbit of mercury being weird, and blaming his telescope. Physics is just a description of reality. If your business depends on reality being the same as the model, then you're going to have an expensive time.

thrance 1y ago
Uuh no? Quantum computing relies on some aspects of quantum physics, that at this point, have been thoroughly and extensively experimentally verified. If there are objections to quantum computing, and I believe there are many, those are to be found in questioning the capability of current engineering to build a quantum computer, or the usefulness of one if it could be built.
- m101 1y ago
  As the old saying goes: the proof is in the pudding. And quantum computing has produced zero pudding. All hype, and zero pudding. When they actually do something useful (like the equivalent of general relativity and solving GPS), then we can see it as a useful theory.
  - Hilift 1y ago
    From 12 Years Ago: August 26, 2013 "In early May, news reports gushed that a quantum computation device had for the first time outperformed classical computers, solving certain problems thousands of times faster. The media coverage sent ripples of excitement through the technology community. A full-on quantum computer, if ever built, would revolutionize large swathes of computer science, running many algorithms dramatically faster, including one that could crack most encryption protocols in use today. "Over the following weeks, however, a vigorous controversy surfaced among quantum computation researchers. Experts argued over whether the device, created by D-Wave Systems, in Burnaby, British Columbia, really offers the claimed speedups, whether it works the way the company thinks it does, and even whether it is really harnessing the counterintuitive weirdness of quantum physics, which governs the world of elementary particles such as electrons and photons." https://metanexus.net/proof-quantum-pudding/ https://metanexus.net/proof-quantum-pudding/ https://spectrum.ieee.org/d-wave-quantum https://spectrum.ieee.org/d-wave-quantum

dreamcompiler 1y ago

When non-tech people ask me whether they should invest in quantum computing I tell them nobody alive today will live to see a return on their investment in quantum computing. Not because it's impossible but because the engineering challenges to make it truly useful outside the laboratory are too great, despite what the press releases would have you believe. I tell them the same thing about fusion energy.