Ask HN: Is quantum computing worth the struggle?

2 points by alexyan0431 12 days ago | 11 comments

I am a phd student in quantum computing(QC), and recently I am a little depressed. Over the past few years I have heard a lot of inspiring news about the development of our field, which is exactly the reason that I chose to persue a doctoral degree in this filed.

But as I got closer to the frontline, I found more frustrating facts. The qubits are fragile, hard to maintain even for a single day, and the number are limited by all kinds of factors. The cost is huge, the devices are sensitive enough to feel the draft of room temperature. Not to mention there are few useful applications discovered for quantum algorithms. The beautiful visions seem to become a bubble, and it could burst at any time.

That makes me feel lost about the future: whether I should stick on this field? If not, where can I go? The most familiar things to me is quantum mechanics, and it's useless for almost every other fields.

Desperate...

turtleyacht 12 days ago |

You get to be the person who creates the PDP-11, the Unix, the B (or C) language: fundamental contributions that the majority take for granted, to build our dreams on.

It's ground-level with lots of unknowns. There's not going to be a lot of answers. It's the frontier. There's not a single book or body of knowledge that promises expertise or certification in the applied sense.

Exotic materials, probabilistic effects, cutting-edge research. Isn't that exciting? You get to refine your weaknesses, accept published contributions, and make the same.

manfromchina1 12 days ago |

How far along are you? You could finish your phd, then get a two year diploma in mechatronics, electrical eng, instrumentation. All near future proof and apparently pay well enough. You could even cert up in NDT, IRATA, ROV and that sort of thing. With your phd you'd get your foot in the door pretty easily.

alexyan0431 12 days ago | |

I'm not very familiar with the employment environment at my place, but according to my senior the environment seems to get worse these years. I hope when I graduate I can still find a job with my phd degree. Thank you for your advice!

__patchbit__ 12 days ago |

Xaira_Thera is looking to hire an AI scientist in the biology space.

Wet warm room temperature quantum computing is believed possible and they are looking for evidence of it in photosynthesis. And, the AI says in summary, skyrmion memory in the quasiparticle space is a career in reach to wide spread application.

fragmede 12 days ago |

We want to know how drugs will work in the human brain, to heal Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, and Autism. Classical computing can't run the simulations necessary to model that, and we're not going to be like the Nazis and run unethical science experiments on unwilling human subjects, so we need quantum computing to be able to model on a computer how things will interact in order to help people. That qbits are sensitive to temperature changes… have you seen how sensitive to dust that integrated circuits are?

alexyan0431 12 days ago | |

I agree that the applications for drugs design and material simulations would be the near future for QC, but unfortunately my professor seems not to focus on them. That's another source of my anxiety: when other groups are considering Fault tolerant frameworks, we are still at the most physical layer, and left behind by routes like neural atoms. So that may be more likely a personal trouble lol.

As for the sensitivity of qubits, they're much more sensitive than integrated circuits and it's far more expensive to keep a suitable environment for the former. And there are natural limits for decoherence.

Thank you for your insightful comment!

fragmede 11 days ago | | |

That your professor isn't focusing on them is okay. That can be someone else's job. Need to make the things work first.

As far as the sensitivity. Yes they're more sensitive than ICs. My point was before clean rooms, that level of cleanliness was unheard-of. That quantum computing is another step up isn't surprising. Consider the conditions for some of the most advanced particle physics experiments. Room drafts have nothing on the LHC.

abacadaba00 12 days ago |

The qubit is a dead end.

The future of quantum computing (which has not yet been invented or explored) is quantum holography.

This will be the mathematicians’ sweetest dreams. Manipulate quantum holographic memory space through constructive and destructive interference, multidimensional transformations, translations between surface areas, and the like. This will more closely resemble analog computing than digital.

The engineering problems today are relevant steps yet any programmatic exercises relying on qubits are useless. Spin disposition is not the most information dense aspect of the quantum domain.

The day will come, only not any time soon.

alexyan0431 11 days ago | |

I'm not an expert in quantum holography, but as far as I know, it's a kind of fault tolerance framework. If so, then the most fundamental layer of this technical route would still be qubits, only the requirements for scale or fidelity are looser. Actually I also believe in Fault Tolerant quantum computing, and many great works have been done. But the sad story is our lab chose a route that is not fault-tolerance friendly (at least for now), so I'm a little nervous. Anyway I hope the day will come soon.

abacadaba00 11 days ago | | |

The “qubit” or “spin disposition” is the only discretely identifiable information layer we may technologically access. Multidimensional analog “images” may be stored and retrieved (by passive differential) in this space, without collapsing entanglement. Hyperdimensionality means there are dimensionalities folded into the domain like origami. All of this may someday be accessed, and I’m pretty sure this is happening in our very own brains.