Personally I find quantum computers really impressive, and they havent been given its righteous hype.
I know they won't be something everyone has in their house but it will greatly improve some services.
this post was submitted on 21 Aug 2024
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It's debatable if D-Wave is actually a quantum computer at least in the sense most people use the term. There's a lot of unanswered questions still on exactly how to use and design a quantum computer and we're not likely to get those answers until we can reliably produce and run systems with at least 8 qubits. Maybe DARPA and the military/CIA has such systems, but I don't think anyone else does.
Quantum computers are still mostly theoretical. We have some of the building blocks of one, but there's still a few critical pieces missing. Quantum computers are in about the same place as fusion reactors are. Theoretically possible but not currently producible in a form that's useful without a few more technological breakthroughs.
If the computers are using qubits instead of bits as processing power, then they're a quantum computer, as far as i understand.
I think IBM's most recent chip has a thousand qubits hang on-
IBMs quantum computer has 1121 cubits in their heron chip now in the quantum computer they're producing now and are working toward 100,000 qubits per processor in the next decade.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/technology/article/top-quantum-computing-companies/
From your article,
Until quantum computing has its Alan Turing moment it will remain a curiosity. The power of qubits needs to be yoked as a beast of burden for computation and actual useful problem solving the way that digital computing was with the Turing machine. It's not a certainty that this will ever happen.
Sometimes I think that believers in quantum computing's superiority to digital computing are as silly as those who think we've almost proven P=NP. But who knows, both might be valid.
DARPA disagrees and the US has doubled billions of dollars of investment in the last few years testing available quantum computers.
ibm is increasing quantum processing power just like they do with regular computers.
Declaring that quantum computers is not yet a practical reality despite them being real and functioning, progressing and in use is akin to dismissing the wright brothers after their first successful flight.
if people doubted the wright brothers before they built and flew their plane?
understandable.
but doubting them after kitty hawk is popular willful ignorance, or an aversion to logical imagination.
It's the same common perception about new technology until said tech becomes less-new and widely available, at which point everyone swears they saw it coming a mile away and it's the only way things could have happened.
Electric cars is another great example, people have been moaning for 20 years that they are impractical and their batteries are difficult to manufacture and their capacity just isn't up to snuff so they'll never really take off like gasoline cars, and now everyone with any understanding of the auto industry has pretty much accepted the inevitability of EV dominance.
Okay, I was being somewhat flippant. I don't discount there seems to be progress in some areas but slow and in low-visibility ways. I could even believe much more powerful quantum computers exist in state facilities around the world. Have they been shown to be useful though or there some bottleneck that prevents them from outcompeting digital computers?
An additional concern of mine is what they are useful for is in rapidly breaking vital digital algorithms like elliptical curve cryptography, and can't be allowed in public hands for that reason. Someone elsewhere said there were computers with 1100 qubits, why is it taking so long to exploit these machines to do useful work? Or am I mistaken and there is evidence, I would love to see it.
Would a savvy investor put their money in quantum computing now, was the Wright Company a good buy when it first started? This actually has me on a deep dive about historical stock market graphs...
looks like vanderbilt and morgan invested 1 million dollars in the wright brothers company 6 years after kitty hawk, which would still be very, very early days for investing in flight.
I saw on a website dedicated to the Wright brothers, that but I was curious if there was something recognizable as a stock price listing as a publicly traded company. Larger investors like that might jump in before smaller investors started approaching it.
I posted a question about it on the largest stocks related communities I could find on Lemmy, maybe someone has expertise in that kind of thing. I'll turn it over to AskLemmy if nobody shows up on the smaller forum.
good idea, that will be interesting to find out
ooh good deep dive.
investment in quantum computing by the US government has doubled in less than 4 years, I know China is throwing huge amounts of money at it also, but you won't see large public investment until commercially available products become widespread, which is not to say that you can't invest in qcomputing if you want to.
let me know what you find with air travel investment 120 years ago, I'm interested.
update: looks like vanderbilt and morgan invested 1 million dollars in the wright brothers company 6 years after kitty hawk, which would still be very, very early days for investing in flight.
here's an article sunnarizing several quotes from darpa after experimenting with eight of the currently available quantum computers:
https://www.theregister.com/2024/06/24/darpa_quantum_computer_benchmarking_papers/
The results are mixed depending on what was measured, but it's important to note that DARPA didn't say quantum computing isn't real or isn't practical, just current quantum computers aren't ready to consistently tackle every problem, which is a lot like saying a 1995 desktop can't run Witcher 3.
and for fun, that's obviously the information DARPA has publicly shared, anything quantum computing could be positively applied to with significant efficacy would be a matter of national security at this point.
while not as relevant as the actual results DARPA is releasing, it's important to keep in mind that satellite phones were around '62 but weren't commercially available for at least 30 years.
Three decades of practical development and use cases before that tech becomes mainstream.
Good points, I'm reevaluating my perspective on quantum computing.
From the article you posted, it says that "certain chemistry, quantum materials, and materials science applications" are suitable for quantum computing but that "accelerating incompressible computational fluid dynamics" aren't suitable with current understanding of how the algorithms could work.
My takeaway as someone with a couple years of CS education from years ago is that the qcomputers are good at gradient descent/simulated annealing or something like that but that advantage disappears with more complex problems. Also that we'll need a few more orders of magnitude qubits to make the output "interesting." Still though, helpful to see that something worthwhile is stirring under all that research , I appreciate the insight!
for sure, every time I hear about a new article about quantum computers I think back to the last article detailing the next level quantum computing had been taken, which we're mostly hardware benchmarks and not testing, now darpa is testing more than half a dozen limited-functioning quantum computers I'm all sorts of fields.
now i'm waiting for the next development.