this post was submitted on 14 Mar 2025
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[–] iAvicenna@lemmy.world 5 points 1 day ago

"Microsoft is slated to back up its claims and success in quantum computing next week at an American Physical Society (APS) meeting in California."

Well if they try to put on a show like Elon did with his dancing robots and what not we can be %100 sure it is a pyramid scheme.

[–] portifornia@lemmy.world 24 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Slammed πŸ’₯ πŸ¦Ήβ€β™‚οΈ

πŸ™„

[–] GaMEChld@lemmy.world 3 points 1 day ago

Ka-POW! ZAP!

[–] trumboner@lemmy.world 3 points 1 day ago

Of course its going to be unreliable after you slam it!

What do you expect from the company which promised that windows 10 would be the last one? xD

Are we SLAMming quantum computers now?

[–] Routhinator@startrek.website 12 points 2 days ago

Maybe they were smoking too much Majorana.

[–] cabbage@piefed.social 103 points 3 days ago (3 children)

This is a piece of alleged technology that is based on basic physics that has not been established.

That does sound like a problem.

[–] unexposedhazard@discuss.tchncs.de 65 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (2 children)

I love these slides about how quantum cryptography attacks are a made up scenario https://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/bollocks.pdf

Dude is a comedic genius

[–] lka1988@lemmy.dbzer0.com 16 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (2 children)
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[–] SmoothOperator@lemmy.world 4 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Prime factorisation is indeed nobody's primary idea of what a quantum computer will be useful for in practice any time soon, but it cannot be denied that Shor's algorithm is the first and only method of prime factorisation we have discovered which can finish in realistic time with realistic resources.

And that means that RSA is no longer as safe as it once was, justifying the process of finding alternatives.

[–] sepi@piefed.social 5 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I'm sorry - did you read the slides?

[–] SmoothOperator@lemmy.world 3 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

Indeed I did. They seem to be pointing to the fact that current machines are not factoring primes in any serious way.

Does this contradict my point?

[–] Buelldozer 25 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (1 children)

We should find out next week at APS Global if it's really a problem or a case of Physicist Sergey Frolov, the author of that quote, failing to understand what's been done.

Microsoft could be full of shit about Majorana 1 of course but it would be damned odd for them to make a claim like this without being able to back it up; the fallout would be horrendous.

[–] Gerudo@lemm.ee 17 points 2 days ago

I have to agree with this. Say what you will about MS, but it'd be odd to claim something this crazy that they can't at least sorta backup.

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[–] homesweethomeMrL@lemmy.world 53 points 2 days ago (7 children)

Check it, yo. In the 90s all the articles and rumors around quantum computing were exactly the same. Exactly.

Whenever I hear about some new quantum computing breakthrough, I spend about five seconds wondering if it's real and then I feel very nostalgic because no, it never is.

[–] daniskarma@lemmy.dbzer0.com 17 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Quantum computer do exist. And have existed for some time now. Breakthroughs have been achieved several times.

[–] homesweethomeMrL@lemmy.world 11 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Sure, sure and it’s interesting stuff. But not anywhere near useful in the sense people mean when they talk about computers.

They are as useful as the Large Hadron Collider, or the New Horizons probe.

They are instruments of practical scientific research. They may have some return in useful technology or not, but science is always worth it.

[–] SmoothOperator@lemmy.world 13 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Except quantum computers do indeed exist right now, and did not in the 90's. Sadly, the hype and corporate interests still make it difficult to tell truth from nonsense.

Yeah, sure they exist. Much like the ENIAC. And it’s cool stuff to work with. It’s just not anywhere close to practical. And it never has been.

[–] Kolanaki@pawb.social 28 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I just assume it's in a superposition of both being real and not real at the same time.

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[–] AceTKen@lemmy.ca 60 points 3 days ago (6 children)

Yeah, most quantum science at the moment is largely fraudulent. It's not just Microsoft. It's being developed because it's being taught in business schools as the next big thing, not because anybody has any way to use it.

Any of the "quantum computers" you see in the news are nothing more than press releases about corporate emulators functioning how they think it might work if it did work, but it's far too slow to be used for anything.

[–] SmoothOperator@lemmy.world 15 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] AceTKen@lemmy.ca 8 points 2 days ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (2 children)

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.

[–] SmoothOperator@lemmy.world 8 points 1 day ago (1 children)

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.

[–] AceTKen@lemmy.ca 1 points 3 hours ago

I appreciate the reply!

I made the attempt, but couldn't parse that first link. I gathered that it was about error correction due to the absolutely massive number of them that crop up in QC, but I admit that I can't get much further with it as the industry language is thick on that paper. Error reduction is good, but it still isn't on any viable data, and it's still a massive amount of errors even post-correction. It's more of a small refinement to an existing questionable system, which is okay, but doesn't really do much unless I'm misunderstanding.

The Willow (and others) examples I'm skeptical on. We already have different types of chips for different kinds of operations, such as CPUs, GPUs, NPUs, etc. This is just one more kind of chip that will be found in computers of the future. Of course, these can sometimes be combined into a single chip too, but you get the idea.

The factorization of integers is one operation that is simple on a quantum computer. Since that is an essential part of public / private key cryptography, those encryption schemes have been recently upgraded with algorithms that a quantum computer cannot so easily unravel.

With quantum computing, a system of qubits can be set up in such a way that it's like a machine that physically simulates the problem. It runs this experiment over and over again and measures the outcome, until one answer is the clear winner. For the right type of problem, and with enough qubits, this is unbelievably fast.

Problem is, this only works for systems that have a known answer (like cryptography) with a verifiable result, otherwise the system never knows when the equation is "complete". It's also of note that none of these organizations are publishing their benchmarking algorithms so when they talk about speed, they aren't exactly being forthright. I can write code that runs faster on an Apple 2e than a modern x64 processor, doesn't mean the Apple 2e is faster. Then factor in how fast quantum systems degrade and it's... not really useful in power expenditure or financially to do much beyond a large corporation or government breaking encryption.

[–] Kondeeka@lemmy.world 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

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.

[–] AceTKen@lemmy.ca 1 points 31 minutes ago

So that's the part that gets me stuck. There is no clear answer and it has no way to check the result as QC aren't capable of doing so (otherwise they wouldn't be using QC since they can only be based on binary inputs and binary guesses of true / false outcomes on a massive scale). How can it decide that it is "correct" and that the task is completed?

Computations based on guesses of true / false can only be so accurate with no way to check the result in the moment.

[–] Rooskie91@discuss.online 39 points 3 days ago (1 children)

So glad we dereguled the market so everything is a crypto scam now.

πŸŒŽπŸ§‘β€πŸš€πŸ”«

[–] MagicShel@lemmy.zip 23 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (4 children)

I just saw on Linked In that in 12 months "quantum AI" is going to be where it's at. Uh.... really? Do I hear "crypto-quantum AI?"

[–] TheEighthDoctor@lemmy.zip 4 points 1 day ago

That sounds like something they say your washing detergent has to clean stains better.

[–] ChairmanMeow@programming.dev 12 points 2 days ago (2 children)

QUANTUM AI? IN my blockchain? It's more likely than you think!

[–] Num10ck@lemmy.world 2 points 1 day ago

'distributed compute' using blockchain to farm out ai instances, is a web3 thang.

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[–] kibiz0r@midwest.social 8 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I used a hybrid of near-shore telepresence and on-site scrum sessions to move fast and put the quantum metaverse on a content-addressable de-fi AI blockchain

[–] tonywu@lemmy.world 2 points 2 days ago

Fascinating. Where do I sign up?

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[–] anubis119@lemmy.world 30 points 3 days ago (2 children)

Slammed or lightly pounded?

[–] LinyosT@sopuli.xyz 7 points 2 days ago

S L A M M E D

Just like I S L A M M E D my penis in the car door.

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[–] NOT_RICK@lemmy.world 27 points 3 days ago (1 children)

COME ON AND SLAM

AND WELCOME TO THE JAM

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What's next Theranus doesn't actually make thousand dollar tests for a dollar?

[–] danekrae@lemmy.world 16 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (1 children)
[–] ogmios@sh.itjust.works 18 points 3 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

You can tell that someone is lying about their work in quantum physics when they claim to understand quantum physics.

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