
Trump administration establishes $75M quantum computing centers - jonbaer
https://thehill.com/policy/cybersecurity/508305-trump-administration-establishes-75-million-quantum-computing-centers
======
AnthonyMouse
This appears to be a surprisingly level-headed government initiative. The
amount is enough to do something but not so much as to be a colossal
boondoggle. It's the sort of fundamental research which private industry tends
to under-produce because it's hard for any given company to recoup the full
value of the R&D, but the target area is something with potential downstream
practical implications.

> bipartisan

Also by coincidence (?) the first time I've seen that word used recently in a
context that wasn't preceded by the words _lack of_ or similar.

~~~
loudtieblahblah
>preceded by the words lack of or similar.

Eh, bipartisan stuff still happens. Look at the military industrial complex.
Expanding executive power, expanding the surveillance state. Pro wall street
regulation repeal.

Usually its to screw us

~~~
rescripting
Viewed through that lens perhaps this initiative is to help push quantum
computing to a place where it can break modern encryption.

~~~
ta17711771
Cynical me figured there wasn't much other purpose for those approving
funding.

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oldsklgdfth
I can't tell if this number is large or small.

However, all research institutions take a cut of grant money in what is
usually called "Facilities and Administration" cost. My undergrad rate was 50%
of the proposed sum. Obviously the exact rate varies, but the fee remains.

Ex. If a professor is writes a proposal for 1M. When the funding agency awards
it they tack on another 1M for the institution.

This is why "expensive" research is favored in universities, over theoretical
work. A big part of tenure review is how much money you have brought in in
funding, because that's a direct measure of how much money you made the
institution.

So 75M is more like 30M-40M of directly funded research, with the rest going
to the institutions.

EDIT: Berkeley's F&A goes at high as 60%.
[https://spo.berkeley.edu/policy/fa.html#rates](https://spo.berkeley.edu/policy/fa.html#rates)

~~~
zucker42
That seems like a perverse incentive.

~~~
oldsklgdfth
Agreed. This is what you get when you measure performance in terms of profits.

To quote Major General Smedley Butler: "A racket is best described, I believe,
as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a
small "inside" group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit
of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make
huge fortunes."

Higher education is a rachet.

Students pay ever-higher tuition, which at some level is backstopped by the
government. If you don't go to college and pursue prestigious degrees the job
market will be inaccessible, beyond basic skill entry level.

Graduate students are exploited laborers for the promise of a PhD and a letter
of recommendation for a postdoc. Drawing from a global pool of talent for
cheap research labor. If you don't do everything your advisor says you will
lose your visa, or not get a publication and your academic career is dead-on-
arrival.

Professors are in an environment that encourages pursuing expensive
application-based research and high impact publications to pad their resumes
for tenure. If you don't rake in the money and publish in "prestigious"
journal (usually the walled off ones) you will not be considered for tenure, a
raise, etc.

Tax dollars fund research institutions that take their generous
"administration" fees and then hand over findings to walled garden journals.
If you don't fund research we will not make the breakthroughs that gave us out
"comfortable" way of life.

In the US, student athletes (until recently) could not profit off their
likeness and all the money went to the school.

At the end of the day, the team of MBAs and administrators make fat salaries.
This wouldn't be so bad if institutions used the revenue to improve education
and dissemination of knowledge. Instead, they build fancy stadiums and raise
tuition.

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mhxion
This initiative is launched quicker than I expected, considering the pressure
on federal budget due to the pandemic. It's part of National Quantum
Initiative Act, signed into law in December, 2018.
[https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-
bill/6227](https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/6227)

~~~
zenhack
$75M is rounding error compared to anything being discussed in the vicinity of
the pandemic; I wouldn't really expect it to enter into the conversation.

~~~
koheripbal
Every line item in the budget is a rounding error until you add them all up.

~~~
zenhack
The package they passed in March was $2 trillion. That's _five orders of
magnitude_ difference.

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dr_dshiv
Someone needs to invest in developing improved mental models for quantum
computers. Much of the development of classical computing (particular from a
user perspective) was driven by metaphors: memory, stacks, pipes, files,
folders, etc.

What are useful metaphors in the application or use of quantum computers?

~~~
ahelwer
Quantum computers are modeled with extremely basic linear algebra. Quantum
states are vectors and gates are matrices which multiply those vectors to get
new vectors. How much simpler do you want? You can explain most of it as
rotations around the unit circle which we all learn in high school or earlier.

The problem is pop science crap that tries to explain superposition and
entanglement with complete word salad instead of "linear combination" and
"product vector cannot be factored into tensor product of single-qbit states",
respectively.

Anyway it is extremely doubtful that more programmers will need to learn how
to program a quantum computer than, say, will need to learn how to program a
GPU. They're both useful co-processors for very specific workloads.
Programming will remain a fundamentally classical endeavor.

~~~
dr_dshiv
I'm not necessarily asking for better metaphors of quantum phenomena. But the
opportunities or affordances of quantum computers is extremely unclear, even
to experts. It's like explaining the physics of a transistor to someone and
waiting for them to come up with an app design.

Taking the analogy of a GPU, how would you describe what a quantum coprocessor
could do for a specialist (in, say, neuroscience or material science)? What
kind of datasets would be appropriate? How should they think about what can be
done with quantum processing? That's where I think there is room for metaphor
development.

~~~
ahelwer
The short answer is that all of this info is out there, but it doesn't live in
pop science articles.

For materials scientists the value proposition is clear: quantum computers
will enable efficient quantum chemistry simulations. Here is an overview
paper: [https://arxiv.org/abs/1808.10402](https://arxiv.org/abs/1808.10402)

------
_8091149529
Title of the post is misleading: The newly-funded centers will address three
different topics in the field of Quantum Information Science (QIS).

Quantum computing (the integer-factoring kind) is the focus of only the UC
Berkeley-led consortium. This effort accounts for 1/3 of the announced
funding.

The other two centers will work on Quantum networking (UIUC) and Quantum
sensing (U Colorado).

Original NSF announcement:

[https://www.nsf.gov/news/special_reports/announcements/07212...](https://www.nsf.gov/news/special_reports/announcements/072120.jsp)

~~~
non-entity
> Quantum networking

Any recommended reading materials on this?

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SheinhardtWigCo
Surely this amount pales in comparison to the likely level of investment in
this field by the intelligence community, considering the implications for
cryptography. This is like announcing $75m for nuclear technology research
during the Manhattan Project.

~~~
ahelwer
NIST is already well into a post-quantum crypto competition. Any serious user
of cryptography will have switched to the new protocols by the time quantum
computers become powerful enough to crack production RSA. Cloudflare has
already prototyped protocols in TLS [0]. Scott Aaronson has gone on record
saying he would be "astonished" if this happened within a decade.

This isn't like the cold war days. The quantum computing research community is
close-knit and people would notice researchers being hoovered up by the NSA;
this hasn't happened.

Shor's algorithm is undeniably a groundbreaking result but is not the killer
app of quantum computers. It's more of an unfortunate side-effect.

[0] [https://blog.cloudflare.com/the-tls-post-quantum-
experiment/](https://blog.cloudflare.com/the-tls-post-quantum-experiment/)

~~~
amelius
> Any serious user of cryptography will have switched to the new protocols by
> the time quantum computers become powerful enough to crack production RSA

Yes, but the NSA could still decrypt messages from the past if they recorded
and stored them.

~~~
ahelwer
Well, anyone could yes. That's why if you want messages you're sending today
to remain secret for longer than a decade, you use a cipher that isn't fully
broken by quantum computers like AES. It's really just the key distribution
methods that will be broken by quantum computers, they only get a sqrt(n)
speedup against symmetric-key cryptography: double the key size and you're
golden.

------
bezmenov
For those curious about Quantum computing, an excellent starting point:
[https://quantum.country/qcvc](https://quantum.country/qcvc)

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nomad543
Nobel Laureate Robert Laughlin Dismisses Quantum Computing>
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYQSbV_BlI8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYQSbV_BlI8)

~~~
dandanua
Haters gonna hate. John Martinis at Google did a very good job for silencing
those deniers.

~~~
nomad543
So anyone who questions quantum computing is a hater? Your argument reminds me
of one interview where Elizabeth Holmes said everyone was a hater for doubting
her. John Martinis didn't silence anyone, after decades, still there's no
verifiable proof of quantum computing.

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trissylegs
I think Australia has invested at least that over the past 12 years. Last year
UNSW's Quantum Computer lab got a $25 million grant extension.

~~~
koheripbal
This isn't the US's _only_ quantum computing project or gov't funding.

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upofadown
>...along with helping to develop curriculum for students in the quantum
computing field to help expand the workforce in this area.

How do you develop a curriculum for something that has not been invented yet
and might not even be possible to expand to a useful level? How can you have a
workforce?

Sounds like someone was just cutting and pasting from a general policy...

~~~
non-entity
Doesnt "the workforce" in quantum computing consist of physics PhDs anyways.

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IAmEveryone
...and by not letting anyone not descending in a straight line from the
Mayflower work at it, they make sure it's second-rate, at best.

Of course if he also succeeds in abolishing universities' non-profit status as
he's recently started adding to his culture war talking point reservoir, not
even Americans will be there to run this thing.

------
snidane
Hmm, I thought quantum computing is not happening. See

[https://scottlocklin.wordpress.com/2019/01/15/quantum-
comput...](https://scottlocklin.wordpress.com/2019/01/15/quantum-computing-as-
a-field-is-obvious-bullshit/)

Can somebody dispute this claim?

~~~
_8091149529
It's tempting to dismiss that write-up due to its incendiary style, but I find
that many of its "factory floor" level insights ring true to me.

As an experimentalist, I would agree with the sentiment that the potential
future applications of Quantum computing probably receive too much media
attention, given the maturity level of existing technology.

The technical arguments as to why building a useful QC will be impossible are
a bit more shaky.

First, the post seems to imply that the calibration effort scales with the
number of gates in the algorithm. This is false. In reality, the number of
interactions that need individual calibration is basically the number of
qubit-qubit pairs exposed by the gate library. The most mainstream approach to
error-corrected QC only uses nearest-neighbor interactions, and hence the
scaling is linear.

Second, it is not clear to me why the number of computational basis states
(2^N) is relevant to the engineering at all. Following this line of thinking,
the recent Quantum supremacy result by Google already amounted to a mastery of
2^53 ~ 10^16 degrees of freedom.

Third, an argument is made that large-scale error correction will not work
because of correlated errors, of unspecified nature. I think a claim like this
should come with a mention of at least one concrete source of such errors, so
that we could estimate its magnitude and potential severity. Note that such
calculations are almost the essence of day-to-day work of a physicist.

In the absence of more detail, I can make a generic counterargument: Any
phenomenon causing such correlated errors by definition affects multiple
physical qubits at once, and will tend to be more macroscopic in nature. This
is in contrast with the processes that limit the fidelity of one- and two-
qubit operations, which is what the error-correcting code will take care of.
Macroscopic disturbances are exactly the ones that we can attempt to shield
against with clever engineering.

~~~
dandanua
John Martinis emphasized in his talks that they didn't observe any
correlations between local errors in the Sycamore and the total error can be
computed through the "high school probability theory" from the local errors.
This pretty much silences deniers who used this totally made-up argument
against quantum computing.

~~~
_8091149529
Continuing:

Google (or anyone else) hasn't shown an implementation of an error correcting
code, so we do not have data points for a model-free "ruler extrapolation" of
logical error rate vs. lattice size.

In fact, I think the Sycamore qubits were "pre-threshold", i.e. no error
correction gain possible even in theory. I wonder if someone will
correct/confirm me. I remember the readout fidelity was particularly poor.

Furthermore, I would argue that the large readout errors make the observed
scaling of total error slightly less impactful.

But don't get me wrong, it's still a monumental achievement.

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onetimemanytime
Since we're throwing trillions around these days (needed, absolutely,) I'd
quietly sneak a few billion is vital things that are harder to fund in normal
times.

OK, here are $x Billion, make us #1 in this field.

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Balgair
The CU site is likely tied quantum gyros and axial sensors. Think super
precise positional sensors.

Quantum technology is more than just computers.

Anyone know of any good quantum tech based companies in Boulder?

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JimRyan
"We're making supercomputers, the best computers!" In all seriousness this is
great news.

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Apofis
I'm really happy to hear this, but this problem is expensive and that better
be a B next time.

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RocketSyntax
Hmm. No MIT.

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biolurker1
Why does the title have to be political ans not "The US gov..."? Sounds like
there is an agenda

~~~
jcfields
If the administration deserves the blame when it does something bad, it
deserves the credit when it does something good.

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helsinki
This is sublime. If you’re reading this, Trump, please do more of this.

