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Sigma_Atheist t1_je2n0zv wrote

Amazing. In the very first sentences, you can tell that the author knows nothing about quantum computing:

"Recently, IBM and the Cleveland Clinic unveiled a quantum computer that could advance medical innovation like never before. The IBM Quantum System One was created to crunch large amounts of data at high speeds."

Senseless hype.

Edit: They didn't even report on the qubit count!

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Paraphrand t1_je2ojzs wrote

I can’t help but read copy like that and assume it was written by ChatGPT now.

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Sigma_Atheist t1_je2ovd7 wrote

I doubt ChatGPT would think quantum computers can be used to "crunch large amounts of data at high speeds," unlike your average person who hears "quantum computer" and immediately thinks the thing has an unfathomable clock speed without bothering to fact check. Shame on this journalist.

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mescalelf t1_je2zl6e wrote

20 qubits, per Wikipedia. The Quantum System One released in 2019 lol.

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Sigma_Atheist t1_je2zukl wrote

Then it's useless! 20 qubits are fully simulable on normal computers.

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mescalelf t1_je30cw9 wrote

Yep, it’s a joke; no way it’s gonna do anything useful except act as a training platform that could be just as easily simulated with digital simulation, as you point out.

They’d be better off applying machine learning (in the vein of AlphaFold 2, for instance) on a digital computer for serious R&D.

Well, unless they’ve made one hell of a breakthrough regarding coherence time. Even then, 20 qubits isn’t exactly a lot to work with.

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Nanaki_TV t1_je3bthm wrote

Isn’t there something about alignment or perfect qbits? Where you need more Nonperfect qbits vs perfect to hold data? It’s late. I should sleep.

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mescalelf t1_je3htdl wrote

Not quite the right nomenclature (wording), but wording is often less important than content—and on the content of your question, you’re right.

Unlike digital computers, quantum computers don’t reliably output the right answer—even when they work as well as (we think) they possibly could. Instead, they give a distribution (over multiple runs) of correct and incorrect outputs. , These average out to the right answer if the computation is repeated some number of times.

However, quantum computers produce incorrect outputs much more frequently if a quantum computation is interrupted by some interaction—e.g. a thermal photon. It doesn’t take very much interaction to cause “decoherence”, so many types of quantum computer (including the most popular) have to be cooled to extremely low temperatures. There’s also active research on computational ways of improving fault-tolerance/error-tolerance…unfortunately, even with such methods, thousands of qubits are required to do useful computations. Even with aggressive cooling, none of our quantum computers have been able to hit the necessary qubit counts yet.

Quantum computers aren’t really very impressive or useful with low numbers of qubits. The computational power of digital computers scales roughly linearly with respect to the number of computational transistors. The representational complexity of a quantum computer doubles each time a qubit is added; this doesn’t translate nicely to equivalent computational power, but quantum computers do still have much steeper (exponential) scaling for some types of computational problem. Unfortunately, systems of many entangled qubits are much less stable than smaller entangled systems…so we can’t make good use of quantum computers until we can improve coherence time and/or fault tolerance a good deal.

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uishax t1_je43wfy wrote

Quantum computers, like nuclear fusion, look like they could use a heavy dose of AI-assisted research from GPT-7/8.

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mescalelf t1_je6kc65 wrote

Yep, 100%. They’re both technically soluble, but are, apparently, very nuanced problems. AI (even purpose-built narrow AI) is great with those.

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D_Ethan_Bones t1_je33505 wrote

> Amazing. In the very first sentences, you can tell that the author knows nothing about quantum computing:

Swivelchair journalism, their job is not to distribute facts but to propagate feelings.

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TopicRepulsive7936 t1_je31ei2 wrote

Why do you focus on the reporting and not the actual thing.

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Sigma_Atheist t1_je33157 wrote

Because the reporting is misrepresenting quantum computers by making them out to be some supercomputer, when in actuality it is nothing of the sort and there's already enough misinformation disguised as science journalism around quantum computing as it is. It makes me mad.

Further, what actual thing? Nothing in the article tells you the qubit count or any other relevant stat. Another user pointed out that it probably has 20 qubits though, which is completely useless since 20 qubits can be fully simulated on normal computers.

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