this post was submitted on 14 Mar 2025
468 points (97.8% liked)
Technology
66687 readers
4114 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Quantum science is not fraudulent, incredible leaps are being made with the immense influx of funding.
Quantum industry is a different beast entirely, with scientific rigour being corrupted by stock price management.
It's an objective fact that quantum computers indeed exist now, but only at a very basic prototype level. Don't trust anything a journalist says about them, but they are real, and they are based on technology we had no idea if would ever be possible.
Well, I love being wrong! Are you able to show a documented quantum experiment that was carried out on a quantum computer (and not an emulator using a traditional architecture)?
How about a use case that isn't simply for breaking encryption, benchmarking, or something deeply theoretical that they have no way to know how to actually program for or use in the real world?
I'm not requesting these proofs to be snarky, but simply because I've never seen anything else beyond what I listed.
When I see all the large corporations mentioning the processing power of these things, they're simply mentioning how many times they can get an emulated tied bit to flip, and then claiming grandiose things for investors. That's pretty much it. To me, that's fraudulent (or borderline) corporate BS.
Hell yes! I'd love to share some stuff.
One good example of a quantum computer is the Lukin group neutral atoms work. As the paper discusses, they managed to perform error correction procedures making 48 actual logical qubits and performing operations on them. Still not all that practically useful, but it exists, and is extremely impressive from a physics experiment viewpoint.
There are also plenty of meaningful reports on non-emulated machines from the corporate world. From the big players examples include the Willow chip from Google and Heron from IBM being actual real quantum devices doing actual (albeit basic) operations. Furthermore there are a plethora of smaller companies like OQC and Pasqal with real machines.
On applications, this review is both extensive and sober, outlining the known applications with speedups, costs and drawbacks. Among the most exciting are Fermi-Hubbard model dynamics (condensed matter stuff), which is predicted to have exponential speedup with relatively few resources. These all depend on a relatively narrow selection of tricks, though. Among interesting efforts to fundamentally expand what tricks are available is this work from the Babbush group.
Let me know if that's not what you were looking for.
Use cases are generally problems with very large amount of factors that are not feasible to calculate with normal comouters, think about chemical/medicine simulation and logistics optimization or public transport timetables.