Microsoft Doubles Down on Controversial Quantum Computing Claims(www.science.org)
23 pointsby igortru3 hours ago3 comments
  • kristjankan hour ago
    It really looks like they are trying hard to scale a system that is simply explained away by a simpler model... From TFA:

      The switching behavior they see could just be an electron hopping on and off a quantum dot, perhaps one formed incidentally by part of the wirelike region, Legg says. “This is exactly what you could get from a quantum dot.”
    I won't pretend I have a deep understanding of any of this, so the only parameters I can judge is the consensus of people that do, and these people aren't too happy about the claims being made.
    • IcyWindows22 minutes ago
      It sucks to have your work made redundant, so it's hard to understand if their critism is founded or just sour grapes.
    • sieabahlparkan hour ago
      [dead]
  • jdw642 hours ago
    When quantum computing becomes mainstream, what will be the first standard programming language? I wonder what the 'C' of quantum computers will be
    • hannoban hour ago
      My prediction would be that it won't become mainstream.

      Even if it will be practically possible to build quantum computers for average users (given they currently rely on complex physical experiments, one can doubt that), there's the question of whether there's a need for "mainstream" quantum computing.

      As has often been said, quantum computers aren't some magical thing that makes every computation faster. They are faster at some very specific problems like breaking cryptography (I doubt that there's a mass market for decrypting the old WIFI traffic you stored from your neighbor, and, these days, most internet traffic is already pq safe) and simulating physics (also probably not something average joe wants to do every day).

      In all likelihood, quantum computers will be specialized devices used, e.g., by scientists. You may be able to rent your quantum computing time if that gets cheap enough to be practical, but I doubt many people will ever own one.

      • echoanglean hour ago
        > simulating physics (also probably not something average joe wants to do every day)

        Maybe this will be used for video games at some point?

        Saying that this will never happen feels a bit like what people were saying about computers when they were filling rooms and cost a fortune, and now everyone has a few of them and finds a lot of uses for them.

        • yorwba9 minutes ago
          It's possible to simulate the classical physics of fairly large game worlds using fairly small classical computer. If you wanted to model it using quantum physics instead (where quantum computers would theoretically have an advantage) said computer would need so many qubits that it would be much larger than the world it's supposed to simulate, while the additional realism would be essentially imperceptible to the player. You'd be better off using analog computing by putting a telepresence robot inside a real-world game arena.
        • SonOfLilit7 minutes ago
          Quantum computers help simulate the unintuitive parts of physics, not those that feel natural to humanst and therefore make sense to include in a game.
      • retubean hour ago
        I am reminded of Alexander Bell - one day every city in America will have a telephone!
        • trick-or-treat20 minutes ago
          640 qubits ought to be enough for anybody.
      • razakelan hour ago
        >You may be able to rent your quantum computing time if that gets cheap enough to be practical, but I doubt many people will ever own one.

        You already can rent time on one - IBM and others offer it - but they are not cheap.

      • dr_dshiv29 minutes ago
        Check out https://quantumvibecoding.org if you want to run some circuits via Claude or codex.
    • veltas2 hours ago
      I don't know, but you'll be able to write Fortran in it.
    • giacomofortean hour ago
      Multiple Python based DSLs, just like now with GPU programming.
    • chr1an hour ago
      It can't become mainstream, it is a very narrowly specialized hardware for a very limited set of tasks.
      • TurdF3rguson30 minutes ago
        One of those tasks though is "modeling reality".
        • mert-kurttutan16 minutes ago
          We can model many "reality" with the classical methods good enough, using Deep Learning and Tensor Network based methods, see for instance - https://quantumfrontiers.com/author/roundsphereblog/ - https://www.quantamagazine.org/key-chemistry-question-answer...

          When it comes to many of these systems relevant real world (e.g. quantum chemistry), classical heuristic-based approaches are already successful enough. For instance, you can run one of the simulations in Garnet Chan paper in a 10-15 minutes using some machine similar to DGX Spark to simulate FeMo-cofactor model within accepted quantum chemistry precisions.

          I believe its biggest application will be to explore some areas in quantum information (e.g. quantum coherence), all the practical applications will be minor.

    • Escapade5160an hour ago
      I feel they should call it Q.
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