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I didn't get the quantum hype last year. At least with AI, you can see it do some impressive things with caveats, and there are bull and bear cases that are bot

I didn't get the quantum hype last year. At least with AI, you can see it do some impressive things with caveats, and there are bull and bear cases that are both reasonable. The quantum hype training is promising the world, but compared to AI, it's at the linear regression stage.

dekhn 7mo ago
It's a variation of nerd snipe. https://xkcd.com/356/ https://xkcd.com/356/ People get taken by the theoretical coolness and ultimate utility of the idea, and assume it's just a matter of clever ideas and engineering to make it a reality. At some point, it becomes mandatory to work on it because the win would be so big it would make them famous and win all sorts of prizes and adulation. QC is far earlier than "linear regression" because linear regression worked right away when it was invented (reinvented multiple times, I think). Instead, with QC we have: an amazing theory based on our current understanding of physics, and the ability to build lab machines that exploit the theory, and some immediate applications were a powerful enough quantum computer built. On the other side, making one that beats a real computer for anything other than toy challenges is a huge engineering challenge, and every time somebody comes up with a QC that does something interesting, it spurs the classical computing folks to improve their results, which can be immediately applied on any number of off-the-shelf systems.
- antonvs 7mo ago
  > People get taken by the theoretical coolness and ultimate utility of the idea, and assume it's just a matter of clever ideas and engineering to make it a reality. At some point, it becomes mandatory to work on it because the win would be so big it would make them famous and win all sorts of prizes and adulation. Good description. Commercial fusion power seems to be in the same category currently. The next step once you have enough thinkers working on the problem is to start pretending that commercial success is merely a few years away, with 5 or 10 years being the ideal number.
bawolff 7mo ago
Quantum computing is cool, but a lot of the people who were hyping it last year were absolute charletons. They were promosing things that quantum computers couldn't even do theoretically let alone next year. Even the more down to earth claims were stuff we are still 10-40 years away from presented as if its going to happen next month. Quantum computers are still cool and things worthy of research. Its going to be a very long road though. Where we are with quantum computers is like equivalent to where we were with regular computers in the 1800s. The hype people just make everything suck and should be ignored.
jerf 7mo ago
The only things I'm aware of that I consider actual problems it solves are "it breaks classical encryption" and "you may be able to use it to directly model other quantum systems like for protein folding and such". Everything else I consider pretty silly. "It can improve logistics" - I'm fairly sure computers are already as good as they can be, what dominates logistics calculations isn't an inability to optimize but the fact the real world can only conform so closely to any model you build. "It can improve finance" - same deal, really. All the other examples I see cited are problem where we've probably already got running code that is at the noise floor imposed by reality and its stubborn unwillingness to completely conform to plans. If I had $1 to invest between AI and quantum computing I'd end up rounding the fraction of a cent that should rationally go to quantum computing and put the whole dollar in AI. By far the most exciting possibility is one that Scott Aaronson has cited, which is, what if quantum computers fail somehow? To put it in simple and unsophisticated terms, what if we could prove that you can't entangle more than 1024 qubits and do a certain amount of calculation with them? What if the universe actually refuses to factor a thousand-digit prime number? The way in which it fails would inevitably be incredibly interesting.
- adrian_b 7mo ago
  It does not even break classical encryption (though classical encryption needs higher security margins if attacks using quantum computers are possible). It breaks only classical public-key encryption. Public-key encryption is not necessary within a closed organization, e.g. for the personal use of an individual or group of individuals, or within a spy agency or for military applications, though it can make slightly simpler the process of key distribution, which otherwise needs an initial physical pairing between devices. The most important application of public-key encryption is for allowing relations between parties who have never met in person, by the use of digital signatures and of Diffie-Hellman key establishment protocols. This has been essential to enable online shopping and online banking, but not for the more traditional uses of cryptography.

dekhn 7mo ago

It's a variation of nerd snipe. https://xkcd.com/356/ https://xkcd.com/356/ People get taken by the theoretical coolness and ultimate utility of the idea, and assume it's just a matter of clever ideas and engineering to make it a reality. At some point, it becomes mandatory to work on it because the win would be so big it would make them famous and win all sorts of prizes and adulation. QC is far earlier than "linear regression" because linear regression worked right away when it was invented (reinvented multiple times, I think). Instead, with QC we have: an amazing theory based on our current understanding of physics, and the ability to build lab machines that exploit the theory, and some immediate applications were a powerful enough quantum computer built. On the other side, making one that beats a real computer for anything other than toy challenges is a huge engineering challenge, and every time somebody comes up with a QC that does something interesting, it spurs the classical computing folks to improve their results, which can be immediately applied on any number of off-the-shelf systems.

antonvs 7mo ago
> People get taken by the theoretical coolness and ultimate utility of the idea, and assume it's just a matter of clever ideas and engineering to make it a reality. At some point, it becomes mandatory to work on it because the win would be so big it would make them famous and win all sorts of prizes and adulation. Good description. Commercial fusion power seems to be in the same category currently. The next step once you have enough thinkers working on the problem is to start pretending that commercial success is merely a few years away, with 5 or 10 years being the ideal number.

bawolff 7mo ago

Quantum computing is cool, but a lot of the people who were hyping it last year were absolute charletons. They were promosing things that quantum computers couldn't even do theoretically let alone next year. Even the more down to earth claims were stuff we are still 10-40 years away from presented as if its going to happen next month. Quantum computers are still cool and things worthy of research. Its going to be a very long road though. Where we are with quantum computers is like equivalent to where we were with regular computers in the 1800s. The hype people just make everything suck and should be ignored.

jerf 7mo ago

The only things I'm aware of that I consider actual problems it solves are "it breaks classical encryption" and "you may be able to use it to directly model other quantum systems like for protein folding and such". Everything else I consider pretty silly. "It can improve logistics" - I'm fairly sure computers are already as good as they can be, what dominates logistics calculations isn't an inability to optimize but the fact the real world can only conform so closely to any model you build. "It can improve finance" - same deal, really. All the other examples I see cited are problem where we've probably already got running code that is at the noise floor imposed by reality and its stubborn unwillingness to completely conform to plans. If I had $1 to invest between AI and quantum computing I'd end up rounding the fraction of a cent that should rationally go to quantum computing and put the whole dollar in AI. By far the most exciting possibility is one that Scott Aaronson has cited, which is, what if quantum computers fail somehow? To put it in simple and unsophisticated terms, what if we could prove that you can't entangle more than 1024 qubits and do a certain amount of calculation with them? What if the universe actually refuses to factor a thousand-digit prime number? The way in which it fails would inevitably be incredibly interesting.

adrian_b 7mo ago
It does not even break classical encryption (though classical encryption needs higher security margins if attacks using quantum computers are possible). It breaks only classical public-key encryption. Public-key encryption is not necessary within a closed organization, e.g. for the personal use of an individual or group of individuals, or within a spy agency or for military applications, though it can make slightly simpler the process of key distribution, which otherwise needs an initial physical pairing between devices. The most important application of public-key encryption is for allowing relations between parties who have never met in person, by the use of digital signatures and of Diffie-Hellman key establishment protocols. This has been essential to enable online shopping and online banking, but not for the more traditional uses of cryptography.