4 ms·

QC progress happens super-exponentially: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46383233 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46383233

• colesantiago 9mo ago
  Graphs aren't telling me anything. What are the real world use cases now, today? The only thing I see in the QC space, are QC stocks and funding paying for the employment of scientific experimentation, which isn't a real world application. Do I have to wait 15 to 30 years for a series of real world changing breakthroughs that I can already do on a NVIDIA GPU card? That doesn't exponential at all, in fact that sounds very very bearish.
  • vtomole 9mo ago
    The graphs aren't telling you that QC hardware is not improving at a super-exponential pace? There are no real world use cases today. The hardware is not advanced enough yet, but it's improving exponentially.
    • iinnPP 9mo ago
      I think the point being made is that the graphs don't show real world applications progress. Being 99.9999999% or 0.000001% of the way to a useful application could be argued as no progress given the stated metric. Is there a guarantee that these things can and will work given enough time?
      • vtomole 9mo ago
        > Is there a guarantee that these things can and will work given enough time? Quantum theory predicts that they will work given enough time. If they don't work, there is something about physics that we are missing.
        • pohl 9mo ago
          Sounds like a pursuit where we win either way
          • ziofill 9mo ago
            Unless the overall cost is too high, but yes it's definitely worth pursuing as far as we currently know.
          • stocksinsmocks 9mo ago
            Publishing findings that amount to an admission that you and others spent a fortune studying a dead end is career suicide and guarantees your excommunication from the realm of study and polite society. If a popular theory is wrong, some unlucky martyr must first introduce incontrovertible proof and then humanity must wait for the entire generation of practitioners whose careers are built on it to die.
            • deleted 9mo ago
              [deleted]
            • vtomole 9mo ago
              Quantum theory is so unlikely to be wrong that if large-scale fault tolerant quantum computers could not be built, the effort to try to build them will not be a dead end, but instead a revolution in physics.
        • zarzavat 9mo ago
          Quantum theory says that quantum computers are mathematically plausible. It doesn't say anything about whether it's possible to construct a quantum computer in the real world of a given configuration. It's entirely possible that there's a physical limit that makes useful quantum computers impossible to construct.
          • vtomole 9mo ago
            Quantum theory says that quantum computers are physically plausible. Quantum theory lies in the realm of physics, not mathematics. As a physical theory, it makes predictions about what is plausible in the real world. One of those predictions is that it's possible to build a large-scale fault tolerant quantum computer. The way to test out this theory is to try out an experiment to see if this is so. If this experiment fails, we'll have to figure out why theory predicted it but the experiment didn't deliver.
  • kevlened 9mo ago
    > The only thing I see in the QC space, are QC stocks and funding paying for the employment of scientific experimentation Then invest accordingly, and later reinvest your winnings in a different direction.