Quantum computing is almost ready for business, startup says(fastcompany.com) |
Quantum computing is almost ready for business, startup says(fastcompany.com) |
What I would really love to see are some of these computing models brought back to life. Alan Kay's idea of computing looks very interesting albeit very scattered; Exokernels is another interesting thought, which could lead up to very interesting distributed computing model (like an irc, but c stands for computing); Transactional Memory is another. There are a lot of them, and I think they are best served by an organisation in lieu with Bell Labs or Xerox Research..
I've had a period where I was deeply interested in reading and listening to any of his ideas and talks, but I've never spent any time with the information, other than just consuming some of his ideas.
I have some vague ideas about what his ideas are, and where he thinks we're still lagging behind, but I have no idea what "Alan Kay's idea of computing" is supposed to be.
Unless, are you talking about his idea of objects as the smallest abstraction of computers, giving each object something akin to an ip-address; where programming happens by wiring together these objects?
This company has built the easy part first (the web app and database), and now just needs to do the the insanely hard problem at the core of their business which nobody knows is possible to solve.
I would probably not invest, is what I'm saying.
Having a quantum integrated circuit without a way to access it (a cloud platform, in Rigetti’s case), is like having a CPU without a motherboard. How might you expect to program the integrated circuit if it has no infrastructure to allow it to be programmed? This is a key ingredient to quantum advantage, not just the hard science of manufacturing scalable and fault-tolerant integrated circuits, especially since the notion of programming such a circuit is already a woefully nascent field.
I went to a presentation by Gwen at SciPy2018 and got to talk to her a little later. They're doing some really cool things with this stuff. I think they're also trying to just get people more used to quantum programming in general. If you haven't looked up their PyQuil language yet, it's definitely worth checking out. https://pyquil.readthedocs.io/en/stable/
I'd say he's confusing step 20 with step 2 or something...
This reminds me of the carbon nanotube hype, when they we're going to be the best at everything from batteries to bulletproof vests. There are currently 0 CN products on the market, and it is not clear there ever will be.
Betting on an undiscovered technology that isn't proven to exist is far form a sure thing.
And the higher-qubit demos you've heard about have quite low fidelity, meaning they'll need multiple physical qubits to represent each logical qubit.
When a problem scales like 2^(2x), you can easily reach an insurmountable barrier. I'm not saying they will, mind you.
Edit: Thanks everyone for pointing out a flaw in my opinion. For anyone actually interested in delving into the discussion of whether or not quantum computing is faster than classical computing https://cstheory.stackexchange.com/questions/24943/is-there-...
I am very interested to know if that is the case. From my perspective, your claim seems like an intuitively obvious application of TANSTAAFL, but there are experts who actually understand quantum physics who think otherwise. Layman's intuition is not to be trusted. Therefore quantum computing remains tantalizingly more plausible to me than, say, cold fusion.
We're already seeing some of the first commercially available CNT products, though. Take Vantablack[0] as an example. Or for non-commercial applications of CNT tech, see the CNT-reinforced bicycle frame that Floyd Landis used to win the Tour de France in 2006.[1]
When you consider that Bakelite was invented in 1907, but didn't see major manufacture until the 1940s, or that PVC was discovered in the 1870s, but didn't see commercial production until almost the same time, it doesn't seem like CNT are much behind the timeline for plastics. The entire chemical and plastics revolution didn't really take swing until the 1960s.
CNT probably aren't vaporware, and even if they were I don't know if that'd be too damning a story for Quantum Computers. Quantum Computing isn't "undiscovered" or "[not] proven to exist." Plenty of labs have produced physical quantum logic gates, and IBM even makes access to some of their real 5- and 16-qubit machines available online through the cloud.[2]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vantablack
[1] https://archive.fo/20120713061226/http://news.cnet.com/Carbo...
I'd definitely take that bet were I a VC. Note that they've raised about the same amount so far as Juicero did...
Quantum computers are never going to replace or speed up every aspect of classical computation, but the idea of accessing them as a service for certain types of computation is probably not many decades off.
[0] https://quantumexperience.ng.bluemix.net/proxy/tutorial/full...
(Technically we still don't really know whether physics actually allows quantum computers with more than a few bits. Quantum mechanics says yes, but the universe can still veto.)
yes. What isn't proven is that actual implementation of quantum algorithms would be fast enough (i.e. while a given quantum algorithm may be order of magnitude faster using the number of steps/operations a the metric, may it happen that the runtime (using time as the metric) of those quantum steps may take order of magnitude longer ?). There is some indications that various corrections/etc. have to grow faster than linear with the number of qubits.