7 ms·

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 t

• 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
          [flagged]
        • DangitBobby 1y ago
          I would actually like to read about that, though.
        • Henchman21 1y ago
          When you’re of a certain age, time has likely blurred your memories. Citation becomes more important then. Source: me I’m an old SOB.
          • reaperducer 1y ago
            Source: me I’m an old SOB. By your own criteria, a citation better than "me" is needed.
            • pessimizer 1y ago
              Looks like you've got it.
        • autoexec 1y ago
          I can attest to the fact that people who didn't understand computers at all were questioning the value of spending time on them long after the 1970s. The issue is that there are people today who do understand quantum computing that are questioning their value and that's not a great sign.
        • oldgradstudent 1y ago
          In the 1970s both my parents were programming computers professionaly. Computing was already a huge industry. Just IBM's revenues were in the multi billion dollar range in the 1970s. And a billion dollar in the 1970s was A LOT of money in the 1970s.
      • roflmaostc 1y ago
        https://www.ittc.ku.edu/~evans/stuff/famous.html https://www.ittc.ku.edu/~evans/stuff/famous.html
    • lucianbr 1y ago
      Survivor bias. Just because a certain thing seemed like a scam and turned out useful does not mean all things that seem like a scam will turn out useful.
      • monooso 1y ago
        GP's comment didn't suggest that every supposed scam will turn out to be useful. Quite the opposite, in fact. It was pointing out that some supposed scams do turn out to be useful.
        • mrguyorama 1y ago
          GP is just blatantly wrong. Electronic computation was NEVER considered a "scam". The Navy, Air Force, government, private institutions, etc didn't dump billions of funding into computers because they thought they were overrated.
    • RhysabOweyn 1y ago
      I don't think that you can really make that comparison. "Conventional" computers had more proven practical usage (especially by nation states) in the 40s/50s than quantum computing does today.
    • empath75 1y ago
      By the 1940s and 50s, computers were already being used for practical and useful work, and calculating machines had a _long_ history of being useful, and it didn't take that long between the _idea_ of a calculating machine and having something that people paid for and used because it had practical value. They've been plugging along at quantum computers for decades now and have not produced a single useful machine (although a lot of the math and science behind it has been useful for theoretical physics).
    • os2warpman 1y ago
      In the 40s and 50s programmable general-purpose electronic computers were solving problems. Ballistics tables, decryption of enemy messages, and more. Early programmable general-purpose electronic computers, from the moment they were turned on could solve problems in minutes that would take human computers months or years. In the 40s, ENIAC proved the feasibility of thermonuclear weaponry. By 1957 the promise and peril of computing entered popular culture with the Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn film "Desk Set" where a computer is installed in a library and runs amok, firing everybody, all while romantic shenanigans occur. It was sponsored by IBM and is one of the first instances of product placement in films. People knew "electronic brains" were the future the second they started spitting out printouts of practically unsolvable problems instantly-- they just didn't (during your timeframe) predict the invention and adoption of the transistor and its miniaturization, which made computers ubiquitous household objects. Even the quote about the supposed limited market for computers trotted out from time-to-time to demonstrate the hesitance of industry and academia to adopt computers is wrong. In 1953 when Thomas Watson said that "there's only a market for five computers" what he actually said was "When we developed the IBM 701 we created a customer list of 20 organizations who might want it and because it is so expensive we expected to only sign five deals, but we ended up signing 18" (paraphrased). Militaries, universities, and industry all wanted all of the programmable general-purpose electronic computers they could afford the second it became available because they all knew that it could solve problems. Included for comparison is a list of problems that quantum computing has solved:
      • phire 1y ago
        Exactly. There were many doubts about exactly how useful computers would be. But they were already proving their usefulness in some fields. The current state of quantum computers is so much worse than that. It's not just that they have produced zero useful results. It's that when these quantum computers do produce results on toy problems, the creators are having a very hard time even proving the results actually came from quantum effects.
    • belter 1y ago
      You can't put a man on the Sun just because you put one on the Moon.
  • Mistletoe 1y ago
    I became disillusioned when I learned that 5x3=15 was the largest number that has been factored by a quantum computer without tricks or scams. Then I became even more disillusioned when I learned the 15 may not be legit… https://www.reddit.com/r/QuantumComputing/comments/1535lii/whats_the_largest_number_that_a_quantum_computer/ https://www.reddit.com/r/QuantumComputing/comments/1535lii/w...
  • cess11 1y ago
    IBM has given the public access to qubits for close to a decade, including a free tier, and as far as I know it produced a stream of research articles that fizzled out several years ago and nothing generally useful. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Quantum_Platform https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Quantum_Platform
• AndrewStephens 1y ago
  In 2001, a pure quantum computer using Shor's algorithm correctly gave the prime factors of 15. In 2012 they managed to find the prime factors of 21. Since then, everyone has given up on the purely quantum approach by using lots of traditional CPU-time to preprocess the input, somewhat defeating the purpose. Its a shame. I was really looking forward to finding out what the prime factors of 34 are.
  • xxs 1y ago
    The infamous 21 (which is half of 42) was my 1st thought when I heard 'unpopular' which is of course a very popular opinion.
  • JohnKemeny 1y ago
    If I understand correctly, they didn't actually find the prime factors, they merely verified them, so it's unfortunately up to you to factor 34. Maybe some time in the future a quantum machine can verify whether you were right.
    • teekert 1y ago
      It's 2 and 17, I asked Claude.
      • Lionga 1y ago
        Not sure if it was more wasteful of energy asking Claude or trying to solve it with Quantum.
        • solardev 1y ago
          A twelve year old could do it for 500 kcal of cookies.
          • tomashubelbauer 1y ago
            I volunteer as a tribute
• bwfan123 1y ago
  What amazes me is how big tech wants to be in on this bandwagon. There is fomo, and each company announces its own chip that does something - and nobody knows what. The risk of inaction is bigger than the risk of failure. Meanwhile, a networking company wants to "network" these chips - what does that even mean ? And a gpu company produces a library for computing with quantum. Smoke-and-mirrors can carry on for a long time, and fool the best of them. Isaac Newton was in on the alchemist bandwagon.
  • mepian 1y ago
    It is really desperation, the low-hanging fruit of computing paradigm shifts to fuel the "tech" industry's growth was completely plucked more than a decade ago.
  • cjbgkagh 1y ago
    AFAIK, in the case of Microsoft, it's less FOMO and more about execs being able to impress their peers at other companies. So not really a fear of missing out but a desire to have an exclusive access to a technology that has already been socialized and widely understood to be impressive. It's a simple message, 'that impressive thing you've been reading about, we're the ones building that'.
    • jhallenworld 1y ago
      Also: the big company "thought leaders" need something new to talk about every year at conferences like "Microsoft Ignite" or whatever. These people will push funding into things like quantum research just for this. I'm sure they're getting lots of mileage out of LLMs these days... I'm maybe a little jaded having worked on whole products that had no market success, but were in fact just so that the company had something new to talk about.
    • deleted 1y ago
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  • shalg 1y ago
    There are exactly 2 reasons we might want quantum networks. 1. 100% secure communication channels (even better we can detect any attempt at eavesdropping and whatever information is captured will be useless to the eavesdropper) 2. Building larger quantum computers. A high fidelity quantum network would allow you to compute simultaneously with multiple quantum chips by interfacing them. The thing that makes quantum networking different from regular networking is that you have to be very careful to not disturb the state of the photons you are sending down the fiber optics. Im currently doing my PhD building quantum networking devices so im a bit biased but I think it’s pretty cool :). Now does it matter I’m not sure. Reason 1 isn’t really that useful because encryption is very secure. However if quantum computers start to scale up and some encryption methods get obsoleted this could be nice. Also having encryption that is provably secure would be nice regardless. Reason 2 at the moment seems like the only path to building large scale quantum computing. Think a datacenter with many networked quantum chips.
• 77pt77 1y ago
  > I very much quantum today as smoke and mirrors The most accurate and expirimentaly tested theory of reality is "smoke and mirrors". There are so many other areas to say that about, even in physics. But this?...
  • tokai 1y ago
    With the context of the article its clear that GP means quantum computing.
• gaze 1y ago
  Pessimistically I think it's most comparable to fusion. Theoretically possible but very difficult. I'm biased because I'm in the industry, but nothing has cropped up that I've seen that requires a miracle.
  • naasking 1y ago
    > I'm biased because I'm in the industry, but nothing has cropped up that I've seen that requires a miracle. Scaling is itself the open question. Gravitational effects start creeping in when you scale up sensitive entangled systems and we don't have a good understanding of how gravity interacts with entanglement. Entangled systems above a certain size may just be impossible.
    • cwillu 1y ago
      That would itself be a tremendous theoretical breakthrough for all of physics.
  • shrubble 1y ago
    The difference is that whenever it’s daytime and there aren’t many clouds in the sky, you can see an example of fusion working at scale…
    • krastanov 1y ago
      And every time you use a transistor, observe a green plant living, or see that your hand does not pass through the table when you tap it, you see quantum mechanical effects working at scale. Every time you use a telescope, you see quantum information processing (interference) at scale. The control over that process is the difficult part, same as with fusion.
      • walleeee 1y ago
        Transistors, plants, hands, and tables are all macroscopic. We see quantum mechanical effects, but we do not see stable superpositions. None of these real-world examples seem to shield a quantum state from decoherence in the way a quantum computer needs to. The sun demonstrates clearly that fusion is controllable (albeit in a regime we struggle to match). I don't think your examples show that a quantum state can be controlled at the scale we need it to be, and I don't know of any extant phenomena that do. But I am no expert, yell at me if I'm wrong.
• tjpnz 1y ago
  Quantum annealers have been working on real world problems for a while now - assuming they can be expressed as combinatorial optimization problems of course.
  • krastanov 1y ago
    But there is no scalable computational advantage with quantum annealers. They are not what most people in the field would call a "(scalable/digital) quantum computer".
• hnthrow90348765 1y ago
  D-Wave venturing into blockchain stuff raised a red flag for me as a layman investor: https://ir.dwavesys.com/news/news-details/2025/D-Wave-Introduces-Quantum-Blockchain-Architecture-Featuring-Enhanced-Security-and-Efficiency-over-Classical-Computing/default.aspx https://ir.dwavesys.com/news/news-details/2025/D-Wave-Introd... There are maybe other reasons to invest, but this caused me to sell my shares
  • aurareturn 1y ago
    Looks like they want to become a meme stock.
• EvgeniyZh 1y ago
  > won't be the last time we hear about quantum research that has been foundational to a lot of work This research wasn't foundational to a lot of work. Most of important/foundational works in quantum (doesn't matter if computing or general, I'm not sure which one you meant) are verified. How can you possibly base your experimental work on someone else's work if you can't replicate it?
  • _heimdall 1y ago
    Scientific research today is largely about publishing positive results, we rarely see negative results published and most people focus on publish novel work rather than attempting to validate someone else's work. I agree with you, its a terrible idea to base your work on someone else's when it hasn't been well confirmed in independent research. I consider the source work in the OP as foundational because Microsoft built so much work and spent so many resources building on top of it. It's not foundational to the entire field but it is foundational to a lot of follow-up research.
    • EvgeniyZh 1y ago
      > I agree with you, its a terrible idea to base your work on someone else's when it hasn't been well confirmed in independent research. It's not about whether it's good or bad idea. To make follow-up experiments you need to first reproduce the original experiment. That's why faking "big" experiments like Schön could never work. > Microsoft built so much work and spent so many resources building on top of it. It's not foundational to the entire field but it is foundational to a lot of follow-up research. Will all due respect, a single group (even large one) doing a single type of experiments (even important and complicated one) is not a lot of research. Also, Microsoft knew about data manipulation, that why they moved the experiments in house. They didn't do experiments under assumption that the early Majorana papers are correct, then they wouldn't need to develop their own complicated (and somewhat controversial) protocol to detect Majoranas. It was quite clear for everyone that regardless of data manipulation people were too optimistic interpreting Majorana signatures in these early papers.
      • 1y ago
• andrepd 1y ago
  Wait just so I'm sure I understand what you're saying: you tried to read but don't understand the mathematics, therefore it's smoke and mirrors.
  • m101 1y ago
    Perhaps one only needs to realise that reality is not mathematics?
  • _heimdall 1y ago
    I would be lying to say I understood every bit of theoretical mathematics in the field of quantum mechanics, or any field for that matter. Would you rather I make that blanket claim so you can rightfully call me out for not understanding some part of the mathematical theory or nomenclature instead?
    • andrepd 1y ago
      "I don't quite understand internal combustion engines so I'm bearish on automobiles" seems a pretty dumb take, to put it bluntly.