Data manipulations alleged in study that paved way for Microsoft's quantum chip
141 comments
·May 9, 2025_heimdall
AndrewStephens
In 2001, a pure quantum computer using Shor's algorithm correctly gave the prime factors of 15. In 2012 they managed to find the prime factors of 21. Since then, everyone has given up on the purely quantum approach by using lots of traditional CPU-time to preprocess the input, somewhat defeating the purpose.
Its a shame. I was really looking forward to finding out what the prime factors of 34 are.
thesz
https://eprint.iacr.org/2015/1018.pdf
"As pointed out in [57], there has never been a genuine implementation of Shor’s algorithm. The only numbers ever to have been factored by that type of algorithm are 15 and 21, and those factorizations used a simplified version of Shor’s algorithm that requires one to know the factorization in advance..."
If you have a clue what these factors are, you can build an implementation of Shor's algorithm for them, I guess.
EvgeniyZh
There was for this year's sigbovik [1]
[1] https://fixupx.com/CraigGidney/status/1907199729362186309
JohnKemeny
If I understand correctly, they didn't actually find the prime factors, they merely verified them, so it's unfortunately up to you to factor 34. Maybe some time in the future a quantum machine can verify whether you were right.
teekert
It's 2 and 17, I asked Claude.
xxs
The infamous 21 (which is half of 42) was my 1st thought when I heard 'unpopular' which is of course a very popular opinion.
bwfan123
What amazes me is how big tech wants to be in on this bandwagon. There is fomo, and each company announces its own chip that does something - and nobody knows what. The risk of inaction is bigger than the risk of failure.
Meanwhile, a networking company wants to "network" these chips - what does that even mean ? And a gpu company produces a library for computing with quantum.
Smoke-and-mirrors can carry on for a long time, and fool the best of them. Isaac Newton was in on the alchemist bandwagon.
shalg
There are exactly 2 reasons we might want quantum networks.
1. 100% secure communication channels (even better we can detect any attempt at eavesdropping and whatever information is captured will be useless to the eavesdropper)
2. Building larger quantum computers. A high fidelity quantum network would allow you to compute simultaneously with multiple quantum chips by interfacing them.
The thing that makes quantum networking different from regular networking is that you have to be very careful to not disturb the state of the photons you are sending down the fiber optics.
Im currently doing my PhD building quantum networking devices so im a bit biased but I think it’s pretty cool :).
Now does it matter I’m not sure. Reason 1 isn’t really that useful because encryption is very secure. However if quantum computers start to scale up and some encryption methods get obsoleted this could be nice. Also having encryption that is provably secure would be nice regardless.
Reason 2 at the moment seems like the only path to building large scale quantum computing. Think a datacenter with many networked quantum chips.
nativeit
> 100% secure communication channels (even better we can detect any attempt at eavesdropping and whatever information is captured will be useless to the eavesdropper) chips. A few follow up questions:
1. What is it about quantum computers that can guarantee 100% secure communication channels?
2. If the communications are 100% secure, why are we worried about eavesdropping?
3. If it can detect eavesdropping, why do we need to concern ourselves with the information they might see/hear? Just respond to the detection.
4. What is it about quantum computing that would make an eavesdroppers’ overheard information useless to them, without also obviating said information to the intended recipients?
This is where the language used to discuss this topic turns into word salad for me. None of the things you said necessarily follow from the things that were said before them, but rather just levied as accepted fact.
nativeit
I feel like most of your answer was just re-stating the question. I’m happy to admit that’s almost certainly a mix of my ignorance on the topic at hand, and I have been primed to view the discussions surrounding quantum computing with suspicion, but either way, that’s the way it reads to this layperson.
thesz
What is the difference between channel error or distortion and eavesdropping?
chatmasta
If studio execs have their way, Quantum DRM will be the killer use case…
cjbgkagh
AFAIK, in the case of Microsoft, it's less FOMO and more about execs being able to impress their peers at other companies. So not really a fear of missing out but a desire to have an exclusive access to a technology that has already been socialized and widely understood to be impressive. It's a simple message, 'that impressive thing you've been reading about, we're the ones building that'.
jhallenworld
Also: the big company "thought leaders" need something new to talk about every year at conferences like "Microsoft Ignite" or whatever. These people will push funding into things like quantum research just for this. I'm sure they're getting lots of mileage out of LLMs these days...
I'm maybe a little jaded having worked on whole products that had no market success, but were in fact just so that the company had something new to talk about.
null
no_wizard
>Isaac Newton was in on the alchemist bandwagon
An often overlooked or unmentioned fact too!
I think its a shame, because it humanizes the (for lack of a better term) smartest people in history to know these things about them.
Yes, Newton invented calculus, but he also tried to turn lead into gold!
So you too, might be able to do something novel, is the idea.
sharpshadow
It’s not only big tech. Since months I’m reading about joint venture types between companies of European countries with state sponsoring in QC. When you follow the path there are a bundle of fresh created companies in every country each claiming a branch like quantum communication, quantum encryption, quantum this.. all working together and cooperating with the same companies in other EU countries.
Still trying to figure out what is going on. Are they preposition for the upcoming breakthroughs and until then it will be like the beginning in AI where many claimed to have it but actually just pretended. Additionally they likely want to access the money flow.
mepian
It is really desperation, the low-hanging fruit of computing paradigm shifts to fuel the "tech" industry's growth was completely plucked more than a decade ago.
hnthrow90348765
D-Wave venturing into blockchain stuff raised a red flag for me as a layman investor: https://ir.dwavesys.com/news/news-details/2025/D-Wave-Introd...
There are maybe other reasons to invest, but this caused me to sell my shares
EvgeniyZh
> won't be the last time we hear about quantum research that has been foundational to a lot of work
This research wasn't foundational to a lot of work. Most of important/foundational works in quantum (doesn't matter if computing or general, I'm not sure which one you meant) are verified. How can you possibly base your experimental work on someone else's work if you can't replicate it?
_heimdall
Scientific research today is largely about publishing positive results, we rarely see negative results published and most people focus on publish novel work rather than attempting to validate someone else's work.
I agree with you, its a terrible idea to base your work on someone else's when it hasn't been well confirmed in independent research.
I consider the source work in the OP as foundational because Microsoft built so much work and spent so many resources building on top of it. It's not foundational to the entire field but it is foundational to a lot of follow-up research.
EvgeniyZh
> I agree with you, its a terrible idea to base your work on someone else's when it hasn't been well confirmed in independent research.
It's not about whether it's good or bad idea. To make follow-up experiments you need to first reproduce the original experiment. That's why faking "big" experiments like Schön could never work.
> Microsoft built so much work and spent so many resources building on top of it. It's not foundational to the entire field but it is foundational to a lot of follow-up research.
Will all due respect, a single group (even large one) doing a single type of experiments (even important and complicated one) is not a lot of research. Also, Microsoft knew about data manipulation, that why they moved the experiments in house. They didn't do experiments under assumption that the early Majorana papers are correct, then they wouldn't need to develop their own complicated (and somewhat controversial) protocol to detect Majoranas. It was quite clear for everyone that regardless of data manipulation people were too optimistic interpreting Majorana signatures in these early papers.
gaze
Pessimistically I think it's most comparable to fusion. Theoretically possible but very difficult. I'm biased because I'm in the industry, but nothing has cropped up that I've seen that requires a miracle.
naasking
> I'm biased because I'm in the industry, but nothing has cropped up that I've seen that requires a miracle.
Scaling is itself the open question. Gravitational effects start creeping in when you scale up sensitive entangled systems and we don't have a good understanding of how gravity interacts with entanglement. Entangled systems above a certain size may just be impossible.
shrubble
The difference is that whenever it’s daytime and there aren’t many clouds in the sky, you can see an example of fusion working at scale…
krastanov
And every time you use a transistor, observe a green plant living, or see that your hand does not pass through the table when you tap it, you see quantum mechanical effects working at scale. Every time you use a telescope, you see quantum information processing (interference) at scale. The control over that process is the difficult part, same as with fusion.
_heimdall
Quantum state is the miracle in my opinion. By definition it can never really be confirmed.
You cannot observe the initial state because that collapses the super position. Said more simply, we can only see the end result and make educated guesses as to how it happened and what the state was prior to the experiment.
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andrepd
Wait just so I'm sure I understand what you're saying: you tried to read but don't understand the mathematics, therefore it's smoke and mirrors.
yesbut
It is all a scam. The research side is interesting for what it is, but the idea of having any type of useful "quantum computer" is sci-fi make believe. The grifters will keep stringing investors and these large corporations along for as long as possible. Total waste of resources.
Mistletoe
I became disillusioned when I learned that 5x3=15 was the largest number that has been factored by a quantum computer without tricks or scams. Then I became even more disillusioned when I learned the 15 may not be legit…
https://www.reddit.com/r/QuantumComputing/comments/1535lii/w...
cess11
IBM has given the public access to qubits for close to a decade, including a free tier, and as far as I know it produced a stream of research articles that fizzled out several years ago and nothing generally useful.
roflmaostc
Why do you think so?
Your words sounds like what people said in the 40s and 50s about computers.
os2warpman
In the 40s and 50s programmable general-purpose electronic computers were solving problems.
Ballistics tables, decryption of enemy messages, and more. Early programmable general-purpose electronic computers, from the moment they were turned on could solve problems in minutes that would take human computers months or years. In the 40s, ENIAC proved the feasibility of thermonuclear weaponry.
By 1957 the promise and peril of computing entered popular culture with the Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn film "Desk Set" where a computer is installed in a library and runs amok, firing everybody, all while romantic shenanigans occur. It was sponsored by IBM and is one of the first instances of product placement in films.
People knew "electronic brains" were the future the second they started spitting out printouts of practically unsolvable problems instantly-- they just didn't (during your timeframe) predict the invention and adoption of the transistor and its miniaturization, which made computers ubiquitous household objects.
Even the quote about the supposed limited market for computers trotted out from time-to-time to demonstrate the hesitance of industry and academia to adopt computers is wrong.
In 1953 when Thomas Watson said that "there's only a market for five computers" what he actually said was "When we developed the IBM 701 we created a customer list of 20 organizations who might want it and because it is so expensive we expected to only sign five deals, but we ended up signing 18" (paraphrased).
Militaries, universities, and industry all wanted all of the programmable general-purpose electronic computers they could afford the second it became available because they all knew that it could solve problems.
Included for comparison is a list of problems that quantum computing has solved:
RhysabOweyn
I don't think that you can really make that comparison. "Conventional" computers had more proven practical usage (especially by nation states) in the 40s/50s than quantum computing does today.
lucianbr
Survivor bias. Just because a certain thing seemed like a scam and turned out useful does not mean all things that seem like a scam will turn out useful.
belter
You can't put a man on the Sun just because you put one on the Moon.
empath75
By the 1940s and 50s, computers were already being used for practical and useful work, and calculating machines had a _long_ history of being useful, and it didn't take that long between the _idea_ of a calculating machine and having something that people paid for and used because it had practical value.
They've been plugging along at quantum computers for decades now and have not produced a single useful machine (although a lot of the math and science behind it has been useful for theoretical physics).
skywhopper
Do you have any citations for that?
krastanov
This is such a beautiful theoretical idea (a type of "natural" error correction which protects the qubits without having to deal with the exorbitant overhead of error correcting codes). It is very disheartening and discouraging and just plain exhausting that there has been so much "data manipulation" in this subfield (see all the other retracted papers from the last 5 years mentioned in the article). I can only imagine how hard this must be on the junior scientists on the team who have been swept into it without much control.
pc86
Hopefully people are keeping lists of the PIs on these redacted papers and keeping that in mind for future grants, hiring, etc. I know almost nobody is, but one can hope.
Academic fraud ranging from plagiarism to outright faking data should, more often than not, make it basically impossible for you to get any academic job whatsoever, in your field or others.
This chip is an extreme example, but potentially millions of dollars of productivity, hundreds or even thousands of people spending months or years on something based in a fabrication.
The person or people directly responsible for this should never work again.
jakobgm
Totally agree! As with any behavior which is difficult to detect and often goes by unnoticed; the punishment should be large enough for the expected value of fraud being clearly net negative for those that might feel tempted at "tweaking some numbers".
In case anybody else also isn't familiar with "PI" as an abbreviation in this context:
> In many countries, the term principal investigator (PI) refers to the holder of an independent grant and the lead researcher for the grant project, usually in the sciences, such as a laboratory study or a clinical trial.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal_investigator
mensetmanusman
This would be half of the nsf grants according to the replication crisis work.
MeteorMarc
Or get rehabilitated, like Leo Kouwenhoven, see https://delta.tudelft.nl/article/gerehabiliteerde-kouwenhove...
77pt77
I missed the redemption.
nextos
> Academic fraud ranging from plagiarism to outright faking data should, more often than not, make it basically impossible for you to get any academic job whatsoever, in your field or others.
Sadly, the system is often rewarding fake or, especially, exaggerated/misrepresented data and conclusions. I think that a significant proportion of articles exaggerate findings and deliberately cherry-pick data.
It's a market of lemons. Proving misrepresentation is really hard, and the rewards for doing so are immense. Publishing an article in Nature, Science, or Cell is a career-defining moment.
pc86
Yeah I agree it's not an easy problem to solve by any stretch. I'm not a professor or scientist so I won't pretend to understand the intricacies of journal publication and that sort of thing.
But I do wonder when someone's PhD thesis gets published and it turns out they plagiarized large parts of it, why isn't their degree revoked? When someone is a professor at a prestigious institution and they fabricate data, why are they still teaching the following year?
NoMoreNicksLeft
>Academic fraud ranging from plagiarism to outright faking data should, more often than not, make it basically impossible for you to get any academic job whatsoever, in your field or others.
That might actually be a perverse incentive. If you've already nuked your career with some fraud, you can't make it worse by extra fraud... why ever stop? People inclined to do this sort of thing, when faced with that deterrent just double down and commit even more fraud, they figure the best that can be hoped for is to do it so much and so perfectly that they're never discovered.
The trouble is that the system for science worked well when there exists only some tiny number of scientists, but now we're a planet of 8 billion and where people tell their children they have to go to college and get a STEM degree. Hell, you can only become a scientist by producing new research, even if there's not much left to research in your field. And the only way to maintain that position as a scientist is "to publish or perish". We have finite avenues of research with an ever-growing population of scientists, bullshit is inevitable.
nathan_compton
My hunch is that these double down types won't be dissuaded by much of anything. I think fundamentally this kind of person has a risk taking personality and often feels they will get away with it.
dullcrisp
You stop because you can’t get a job?
pc86
Even if "bullshit is inevitable" is true -- I don't think it is -- that doesn't mean we shouldn't punish people who make up data, who steal others' work, who steal grant money by using their fake data to justify future grants.
"Well there's lots of people now" is not really a great justification. You become a low trust society by allowing trust to deteriorate. That happens in part because you choose not to punish people who violate that trust in the first place.
teekert
Sabine was already skeptical in February [0]. Although to be fair, she usually is :) But in this field, I think it is warranted.
[0]: https://backreaction.blogspot.com/2025/02/microsoft-exaggera...
dsabanin
Is there something she is not skeptical of or controversial about?
chermi
A broken clock....
eqvinox
Sabine Hossenfelder has grown a little… controversial… lately. You should probably do some googling (or YouTube searching, in this case.) It's not entirely clear to me what's going on but some of her videos do raise serious question marks.
antidumbass
I've found great success in ignoring, entirely, baseless aspersions cast by faceless anon avatars about people in the public eye.
matkoniecz
can you be more specific what you are alleging?
and little controversy is not automatically a problem or reason to discount/ignore someone anyway
eqvinox
No, I'm intentionally not taking a position or alleging anything. I'm pointing out the existence of some controversy. It's up to you to decide whether you want to look into it, and if yes, what sources to prefer.
immibis
She has a tendency to be wrong on things outside her domain of expertise. It's the classic being an expert in one field and thinking you're an expert in all of them.
HideousKojima
There was an email she claimed to have received many years ago from another academic essentially saying "you're right that a lot of academic research is BS and just a jobs program for academics, but you shouldn't point that out because it's threatening a lot of people's livelihood." Some people are claiming she fabricated this alleged email etc., I haven't looked too much into it myself.
Panoramix
Looking at the paper, cherry picking 5 out of 21 devices is in itself not a deal breaker IMO, but it's certainly something they should have disclosed. I bet this happens all the time with these kinds of exotic devices that take almost a year to manufacture only for a single misplaced atom to ruin the whole measurement.
Average of positive and negative Vbias data and many other manipulations are hard to justify, this reeks of "desperate PhD needed to publish at all costs". Yet at the same time I wouldn't fully disqualify the findings, but make the conclusion a lot weaker "there might be something here".
All in all, it's in Microsoft's interests that the data is not cooked. They can only ride on vaporware for so long. Sooner or later the truth will come out; and if Microsoft is burning a lot of cash to lie to everyone, the only loser will be Microsoft.
absolutelastone
It wasn't just that by itself. There was a list of several undisclosed data tweaks and manipulations. None were particularly fraudulent or anything, but once you have them all included in the paper, as the former author was complaining, it seems more likely that they just manipulated the theory and data as needed to make them match. There's a big difference between predicting something and demonstrating it in experiment, versus showing your theory can be made to fit some data you have been given when you can pick the right adjustments and subset of data.
darth_avocado
> cherry picking 5 out of 21 devices is in itself not a deal breaker IMO
Might as well draw a straight line through a cloud of data points that look like a dog
crote
It's a physical device at the bleeding edge of capabilities. Defects are pretty much a guarantee, and getting a working sample is a numbers game. Is it really that strange to not get a 100% yield?
Having 5 working devices out of 21 is normal. The problem is that the other 16 weren't mentioned.
darth_avocado
Well you also need to account for what kind of deviation are we talking about between the 21. If they selected the 5 because they were the best, but the others showed results that were within say 0-5% of the 5, then sure that is acceptable. But if we’re talking about flipping a coin 21 times, seeing heads 16 times and then choosing the 5 tails outcomes as the results, then I would say that’s pretty unacceptable.
nathan_compton
> the only loser will be Microsoft.
Not really - that cash could have been allocated to more productive work and more honest people.
sschueller
Sadly I have the feeling some people are starting to just "play" being scientists/engineers and not actually doing the real work anymore.
77pt77
MBA science.
Only perception matters?
nathan_compton
"Fake it till you make it" was practically the motto of young scientists when I was matriculating. In fairness, I don't think they really meant "fake your research" but our entire incentive/competition based society encourages positive misrepresentation - you can't do science, good or bad, if you get competed out of the system entirely.
Guy Debord wrote a book about what he called "The Society of the Spectacle," wherein he argues that capitalism, mostly by virtue of transforming objects into cash at the point of exchange, (that is, a person can take the money and run) tends to cause all things to become evacuated, reduced as much as possible to their image, rather than their substance.
I believe even GK Chesterton understood this when he said that the purpose of a shovel is to dig, not to be sold, but that capitalism tends to see everything as something to be sold primarily and then as something to be used perhaps secondarily.
There is some truth in all this, I think, though obviously the actual physical requirements of living and doing things place some restrictions on how far we can transform things into their images.
caseyy
"Fake it till you make it." has turned into "fake it." recently, and it seems to be working disturbingly well in society.
os2warpman
As far as I can tell the only thing >25 years of development into quantum computing implementations has resulted in is the prodigious consumption of helium-3.
At least with fusion we've gotten some cool lasers, magnets, and test and measurement gear.
Hasz
This kind of fundamental research though is absolutely worth it. For a fairly small amount of money (on the nation-state scale) you can literally change the world order. Same deal with fusion or other long-term research programs.
Quantum computers are still in a hype bubble right now, but having a "real" functional one (nothing right now is close IMO) is a big a shift as nuclear energy or the transistor.
Even if we don't get a direct result, ancillary research products can still be useful, as you mentioned with fusion.
krastanov
You are right about that (well, except all the progress in classical complexity theory and algorithms, cosmology, condensed matter physics, material science, and sensing, which stemmed from this domain).
But, for the little it is worth, it took much longer between Babbage conceiving of a classical computer and humanity developing the technology to make classical computers reliable. Babbage died before it was possible to build the classical computers he invented.
os2warpman
If you are going to use Babbage as the start of the clock, we must use the mechanical and electromechanical logarithmic and analytical engines created in the late 1800s/early 1900s as the stop.
We must also use 1980 as the year in which quantum computing was "invented".
As far as progress goes, in all of those fields there are naught but papers that say "quantum computing would be totally rad in these fields" or simulations that are slower than classical computers. (by, like, a lot)
krastanov
There has been a programmable electromechanical computer build in the late 1800? Not just a simple calculator? Please share examples, this sounds awesome.
Yes, late 1980s is when I would say quantum computing was conceived.
I gave plenty of examples of positive outcomes thanks to quantum information science in my parenthetical. It is much more than the overhyped VC-funded vapor.
chermi
Based on the comments in this thread... Guys, Microsoft fuckery doesn't invalidate an entire field.
I think certain VCs are a little too optimistic about quantum computing timelines, but that doesn't mean it's not steadily progressing. I saw a comment talking about prime factorization from 2001 with some claim that people haven't been working on pure quantum computing since then?
It's really hard. It's still firmly academic, with the peculiar factor that much of it is industry backed. Google quantum was a UCSB research lab turned into a Google branch, while still being powered by grad students. You can begin to see how there's going to be some culture clash and unfortunate pressure to make claims and take research paths atypical of academia (not excusing any fraud, edit: also to be very clear, not accusing Google quantum of anything). It's a hard problem in a funky environment.
1) it's a really hard problem. Anything truly quantum is hard to deal with, especially if you require long coherence times. Consider the entire field of condensed matter (+ some amo). Many of the experiments to measure special quantum properties/confirm theories do so in a destructive manner - I'm not talking only about the quantum measurement problem, I'm talking about the probes themselves physically altering the system such that you can only get one or maybe a few good measurements before the sample is useless. In quantum computing, things need to be cold, isolated, yet still read/write accessible over many many cycles in order to be useful.
2) given the difficulty, there's been many proposals for how to meet the "practical quantum computer" requirement. This ranges from giving up on a true general purpose quantum computer (quantum annealers) to NV vacancies, neutral/ionic lattices, squid/Josephson based,photonic, hybrid system with mechanical resonators, and yeah, topological/anyon shit.
3) It's hard to predict what will actually work, so every approach is a gamble and different groups take different gambles. Some take bigger gambles than the others. Id say topological quantum was a pretty damn big gamble given how new the theory was.
4) Then you need to gradually build up the actually system + infrastructure, validating each subsystem then subsystem interactions and finally full systems. Think system preparation, system readout, system manipulation, isolation, gate design... Each piece of this could be multiple +/- physicist, ece/cse, me, CS PhDs + postdocs amount of work. This is deep expertise and specialization.
4) Then if one approach seems to work, however poorly*, you need to improve it, scale it. Scaling is not guaranteed. This will mean many more PhDs worth trying to improve subsystems.
5) again, this is really hard. Truly, purely quantum systems are very difficult to work with. Classical computing is built on transistors, which operate just fine at room temperature*(plenty of noise, no need for cold isolation) with macroscopic classical observables/manipulations like current, voltage. Yes, transistors work because of quantum effects, and with more recent transistors more directly use quantum effects (tunneling). For example, the "atomic" units of memory are still effectively macroscopic. The systems as a whole are very well described classically, with only practical engineering concerns related to putting things too close together, impurities, heat dissipation. Not to say that any of that is easy at all, but there's no question of principle like "will this even work?"
* With a bunch of people on HN shitting on how poorly + a bunch of other people saying its a full blown quantum computer + probably higher ups trying to make you say it is a real quantum computer or something about quantum supremacy.
*Even in this classical regime think how much effort went into redundancy and encoding/decoding schemes to deal with the very rare bit flips. Now think of what's needed to build a functioning quantum computer at similar scale
No, I don't work in quantum computing, don't invest in it, have no stake in it.
wordpad
Why couldn't single-user quantum computers be a viable path?
General computing is great, but we built large hadron collider to validate a few specific physics theories, couldn't we we make do with single-use quantum computer for important problems? Prove out some physics simulation, or to break some military encryption or something?
chermi
Oh sure, I'm all for that in the mean time. But the people funding this are looking for big payoff. I want to be clear that this is not my field and I'm probably a bit behind on the latest, especially on the algorithmic side.
IIRC some of them have done proof of principle solutions to hydrogen atom ground state, for example. I haven't kept up but I'm guessing they've solved more complicated systems by now. I don't know if they've gone beyond ground states.
Taking this particular problem as an example... The challenge, in my mind, is that we already have pretty good classical approaches the problem. Say the limit of current approaches is characterized by something like the number of electrons ( I don't know actual scaling factors) and that number is N_C(lassical). I think the complexity and thus required advances (difficulty) for building special purpose hypothetical quantum ground state solver that can solve the problem for N_Q >> N_C is similar enough to the difficulty required to scale a more general quantum computer to some "problem" size of moderately smaller magnitude that it's probably hard to justify the funding for the special purpose one over the generic one.
I could be way off, and it's very possible there's new algorithms to solve specific problems that I'm unaware of. Such algorithms with an accompanying special purpose quantum computer could make its construction investible in the sense that efficient solutions to problem under consideration are worth enough to offset the cost. Sorry that was very convoluted phrasing but I'm on my phone and I gtg.
russianGuy83829
that's going to be a banger bobbybroccoli video
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christkv
So the chip is a paperweight ?
nottorp
Its 5 years away, just like cold fusion and AI.
whynotmaybe
We've had cold fusion for years : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_ColdFusion
And while searching for this silly joke, I'm now baffled by the fact that it's still alive !
nottorp
For every framework that ever existed there's somewhere out there a computer running it and doing real work with it, without any updates since autumn 1988, while the google wannabe solo founders worry about the best crutch^H^H^H^H tooling, their CI/CDs and not scaling.
pelagicAustral
I propose everything is a paperweight until you show an implementation.
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devwastaken
intellectual property is the entire point of modern tech. it doesnt matter if it doesnt work. they want the IP and sit on it. that way if someone else actually does the work they can claim they own it.
repeal IP laws and regulate tech.
6d6b73
[flagged]
Unpopular opinion I'm sure, but I very much quantum today as smoke and mirrors. I've tried to dive down that rabbit hole and I keep finding myself in a sea of theoretical mathematics that seems to fall into the "give me one miracle" category.
I expect this won't be the last time we hear about quantum research that has been foundational to a lot of work turns out to have been manipulated, or designed poorly and unverified by other research labs.