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I find the editorialized title misleading. They trapped 17000 atom pairs in an optical lattice and demonstrated a high-fidelity quantum gate between the atoms o
by fsh 6mo ago
I find the editorialized title misleading. They trapped 17000 atom pairs in an optical lattice and demonstrated a high-fidelity quantum gate between the atoms of each pair in parallel. There is no interaction between the atoms of different pairs and no individual control. The experiment demonstrates a very robust gate scheme, but is a long way from a programmable computer.
- baxtr 6mo agoWith the hype QC these days, I find it hard to separate hype from real progress.
- trollbridge 6mo agoReminds me the state of nuclear fusion.
- blitzar 6mo agoJust a decade away now.
- mrroper 6mo agoSo just like AI?
- ashirviskas 6mo agoNah, it's a decade away from *now*.
- blitzar 6mo agonahhh, definately from *now* though - 100% this time
- dwd 6mo agoNow now or Just now? * I've worked with too many Sth Africans.
- HenryMulligan 6mo agoFor those of us who aren't familiar, what is the difference?
- taskforcegemini 6mo agomost of them live in a different time zone
- dwd 6mo agoThe difference is how soon it might occur, except "now" can also mean they never get around to it. "Right now" is probably the only one that literally means now as the rest of the English-speaking world would assume.
- api 6mo ago… and like fusion it will be a decade away, a decade away, a decade away, six months away, then we have it. The “decade away” phenomenon comes from the fact that it’s basically impossible to time estimate innovation.
- gerdesj 6mo agoI went to school in Oxfordshire in the '80s. Some visiting profs from JET joked that fusion was 25 years away then.
- cbg0 6mo agoBack then things were centered around "can we even do this?" and now it's more of "how do we keep this running more than 5 minutes?".
- gerdesj 6mo agoMy impression back then from those profs was that it (fusion) would be inevitable but you do have to think long term, really long term. I'm old enough now (55) to understand that mentality. I'd put money on something useful fusion related happening within the next 10 years or perhaps 20. I'm not up on the current state of experiments etc but it will happen. AGI? - lol!
- api 6mo agoAFAIK superconductors are a major limiting tech. But we are slowly getting better ones, both by discovering more and by learning to mass produce superconducting wire. With superconductors you can make magnetic bottles. There’s also some interesting inertial confinement work happening. There the limiter is both confinement and the efficiency of the driver. Look up MagLIF for a hybrid magnetic inertial approach under study.
- meltyness 6mo ago... and room temperature superconductors! If only we could sort out the feasibility, interdependencies, and priorities, but we just don't know, or well, I just don't know haha.
- adrianN 6mo agoFusion is a number of dollars away, not years. It gets almost no funding because it’sa science and engineering experiment that most likely will not lead to economically viable power plants in a market dominated by renewables.
- femto 6mo agoThat's progress, if fusion is always only 10 years away now! The running joke used to be that it was always 30 years away.
- michaelcampbell 6mo agoThat's String Theory providing "answers", no?
- pseudohadamard 6mo agoThey should ask Iran to do it, they're only a month away all the time.
- scorpionfeet 6mo agoThat’s why we have “reading”. Literally the first paragraph. So in this case, pretty easy to separate.
- functional_dev 6mo agoThe ETH article title is actually fine - "a new trick brings stability." The hype is in the HN title.
- ionwake 6mo agoits still more than my nephew managed to achieve this morning
- TheEaterOfSouls 6mo agoI have questions. Is he attempting to build a quantum gate array? Seems kind of unfair to compare one person's efforts with a well-established university, if so. :P
- progbits 6mo agoETHZ news page is always overhyped. There is good research coming from there but their marketing is never worth reading.
- wasabi991011 6mo agoIn case others are confused: the old HN title has been changed, and the new HN title is directly from the paper (and definitely not overhyped). Reading the ETHZ article as well as the paper, they both seem pretty accurate and descriptive. Really sad HN is not discussing the actual cool research that was done, but not surprised since physics is outside HN's core competencies.
- dang 6mo agoSubmitted title was "ETH Zurich demonstrates 17,000 qubit array with 99.91% fidelity". We've changed it now. Submitters: "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize." (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) If you want to say what you think is important about an article, that's fine, but do it by adding a comment to the thread. Then your view will be on a level playing field with everyone else's: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=%22level%20playing%20field%22%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...