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.
I personally think we’re on the slope of enlightenment - quantum computing no longer attracts as much hype as it used to, but in the background, there’s a lot of interesting developments that genuinely might be very important.
I'd agree, but that slope will be a long and hard one. And the hype cycle may have many more peaks and troughs of disillusionment, from new breakthroughs, but the researchers will still make steady progress.
The answer for that exists as a superposition of multiple possibilities but as soon as somebody manages to read it it will decohere into just the one.
Amazing computational speedups if you regularly use any of these incredibly specific algorithms. Otherwise useless.
Quantum as a service may exist as a business.
Uh... one of those algorithms in your list is literally for speeding up linear algebra. Do you think just because it sounds technical it's "businessy"? All modern technology is technical, that's what technology is. It would be like someone saying, "GPUs would be useless to regular people because all they mainly do is speed up matrix multiplication. Who cares about that except for businesses?" Many of these algorithms here offer potential speedup for linear algebra operations. That is the basis of both graphics and AI. One of those algorithms is even for machine learning in that list. There are various algorithms for potentially speeding up matrix multiplication in the linear. It's huge for regular consumers... assuming the technology could ever progress to come to regular consumers.
literally for speeding up linear algebra
For a sparse matrix where you don't need the values of the solution vector.
I.e. a very specific use case.
Quantum computers will be called from libraries that apply very specific subroutines for very specific problems.
Consumers may occasionally call a quantum subroutine in a cloud environment. I very much doubt we will have a quantum chip in our phone.
Yes, but, quantum TPM or TPU chips would allow for far more complex encryption. So you'd likely have a portiion of the SOC with a quantum bus or some other function.
However you're correct that it'd take a seachange in computing for a qbit based OS
Strong, post quantum encryption doesn't require quantum computers. It uses different mathematical objects (e.g. matrices)
True. However there is still a usecase. You could sign a cert for uefi much like a payment would. Useful for distributed compute.
Pretty much on the blue line. They cost a lot of money for being barely functional, and it’s not clear whether they’ll ever be anything more
Btw: What a quantum computer can reliably do these days, is tell you 21 is 3 x 7. And it takes hours and quite some traditional computing to do that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integer_factorization_records#Records_for_efforts_by_quantum_computers
We've progressed a bit further than that. But for anyone interested in actual applications for quantum computers... They'll have to wait. It's research at this point. We're making progress one step at a time. But so far no one has even demostrated we're able to scale those computers to a useful size.
So I'd say we're somewhere close to the origin of the axes. Or on a different graph for research that's still science fiction. Together with nuclear fusion power plants, thorium cars, space ships and hypothetical battery chemistry that'll make our electric cars go 5000 miles and not degrade over time.
[Edit: The Wikipedia Article: Quantum comuting also has some good references.]
What exactly is holding QC back right now? Does it require near room-temp superconductivity to become viable or is it just in research phase right now?
I remember that AI/ML was held back mainly because of compute power to price ratio.
There are a few different physical systems that people are trying to build quantum computers with. Superconducting loops are one of the most promising ones, because of a halfway decent decoherence rate. And yeah, superconducts needing near 0K temperature to operate is a problem. It's just hard to scale up while everything needs to be so cold. Room-temp superconductivity would be a huge advantage.
But even then, the decoherence rates are still too high for any long quantum computation. Last I heard, the best qubits are maybe barely getting to good enough errors rates that quantum error correction would be possible - which is great, but 'possible' and 'practical' still have a significant gap between them.
So in short, basically everything about the hardware needs to be better; and its just very very hard. Probably too hard to ever achieve the dream of having arbitrary quantum computation. (But there is always the possibility of some big new idea that makes everything work better.)
We're in the "grifters collecting donations" phase for the foreseeable future.
Quantum computers have already had its hype, so plateau of productivity. It’s just that the plateau is really low.
There is a difference between feasibility hype and adoption hype. The hype about it being possible at all has passed. But the true hype relevant to the graph is when it is implemented in the general economy, outside of labs and research facilities.
Yeah they're similar to fusion. The hype perpetually goes up to the first peak and then back down to the left while they keep working on it
This is the equivalent of saying AI already had its hype because Isaac Asimov was popular.
People are aware of the term quantum computer and basically nothing else. We're a decade pre-hype at least. Only a small handful of specialists are investing in it.
The picture only shows one hype cycle. AI has been through multiple hype cycles. Same will happen with quantum computers, once a new major breakthrough is reached.
Either somewhere on the far left, and we'll see some actual breakthrough with major impact in the future which actually gets hyped, or on the far right and it already happened, it was just too niche for anyone other than a specific small group to notice.
I think the big breakthrough was in cryptography, and yeah, most people don't care. All of your passwords will be useless against brute force attacks in 10-15 years from it tho!
But we already have quantum proof passwords nowadays.
Schrödinger's tech. It's both real and flimflam at the same time.
You've been able to buy a quantum computer for years, so trough of disillusionment.
although DARPA has them, so probably making our way through the trough of disillusionment.
DARPA feasibility studies:
https://www.theregister.com/2024/06/24/darpa_quantum_computer_benchmarking_papers/
available quantum computers:
https://quantumzeitgeist.com/how-to-buy-a-quantum-computer/
You're not going to hear a lot about them the same way people didn't hear about personal computers back in the '60s,, but there are and have been many companies consistently working on improving the accuracy and power of quantum computers.
regular computers were around for decades before being successfully developed into personal machines with commercial utility, quantum computers are kind of in that zone roght mow, big room sized things that have a couple cubits.
but they are real and available, and the field is constantly in development
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,
What everyone should know, however, is that quantum computing is not yet a practical reality. No company has developed a device that can beat classical supercomputers at anything more than obscure research problems that have no real use.
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.
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.
I think we're still headed up the peak of inflated expectations. Quantum computing may be better at a category of problems that do a significant amount of math on a small amount of data. Traditional computing is likely to stay better at anything that requires a large amount of input data, or a large amount of output data, or only uses a small amount of math to transform the inputs to the outputs.
Anything you do with SQL, spreadsheets, images, music and video, and basically anything involved in rendering is pretty much untouchable. On the other hand, a limited number of use cases (cryptography, cryptocurrencies, maybe even AI/ML) might be much cheaper and fasrer with a quantum computer. There are possible military applications, so countries with big militaries are spending until they know whether that's a weakness or not. If it turns out they can't do any of the things that looked possible from the expectation peak, the whole industry will fizzle.
As for my opinion, comparing QC to early silicon computers is very misleading, because early computers improved by becoming way smaller. QC is far closer to the minimum possible size already, so there won't be a comparable, "then grow the circuit size by a factor of ten million" step. I think they probably can't do anything world shaking.
As for my opinion, comparing QC to early silicon computers is very misleading, because early computers improved by becoming way smaller. QC is far closer to the minimum possible size already, so there won’t be a comparable
Thanks for saying this. I see a lot of people who assume all technology always gets better all the time. Truth is, things do have limits, and sometimes things hit a dead end and never get better than they are. Those things tend to get stuck in the lab and you never hear about them.
Inflated Expectations. Most people who are aware of them will still talk about how they're going to destroy crypto. We are very, very far off from the size of QC that could possibly do that. It may not even be feasible to do the quantum juggling act necessary to handle that many qbits. It primarily effects public key crypto, with relatively minor effects on block ciphers and hashes. Plus, we already have post-quantum crypto making its way into TLS and other cryptographic suites.
And don't get me started on the morons who think the NSA already has some super secret breakthrough QC that can already break all crypto. Often from the same sorts of people who (correctly) throw Russell's Teapot at creationists.
Meanwhile, there are far more interesting possibilities that don't need so many qbits. Things like improving logistics or molecular simulation.
I think AI is falling into disillusionment and Quantum Computers feel at least 10 years behind.
AI is falling into disillusionment for like the 10th time now. We just keep redefining what AI is to mean “whatever is slightly out of reach for modern computers”.
Hahaha, I kept saying this to myself while going through this thread. I mean there is a whole wiki page on the concept of AI winters because it's such a common occurrence - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_winter
All points on that curve, at the same time just now, for undefined values of now.
Somewhere around 0,0 or 1,1
There are amazing possibilities in the theoretical space, but there hasn't been enough of a breakthrough on how to practically make stable qubits on a scale to create widespread hype
I know they won't be something everyone has in their house
That's what they said about non-quantum computers 80 years ago.
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
