
Google plans to reach a Quantum Computing milestone before the year is out - recurser
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/604242/googles-new-chip-is-a-stepping-stone-to-quantum-computing-supremacy/
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mark_l_watson
I was excited to read this article up to the last sentence, a quote from the
program manager “We’re trying to get support within Google, and this
experiment has been very good to get other engineers talking to us.” to me,
this statement negates much of the positive spin of the article. That said,
the title does say 'stepping stone.'

My primary professional interest is AI and quantum computing to pushing the
field forward seems almost inevitable.

~~~
nullnilvoid
I did not bother to read the article. The title looks suspicious to me. For a
scientific breakthrough, you don't plan it ahead. Instead, you work hard for a
long time and all in a sudden you hit that milestone. It is unpredictable and
certainly cannot be planned easily.

~~~
21
The LHC was planned 25 years before it was a reality. In fact, one of the
first pictures put on the WWW when it was created at CERN was a schematic of
the LHC:

[https://home.cern/sites/home.web.cern.ch/files/image/update-...](https://home.cern/sites/home.web.cern.ch/files/image/update-
for_the_public/2013/04/screensnap2_24c.jpg)

~~~
delecti
The LHC wasn't a scientific milestone, it was an engineering one. Using the
LHC has _led_ to milestones.

~~~
mr_overalls
In many fields, for the past several decades, scientific progress has been
inextricably bound with technical progress. New tools yield new
experiments/discoveries.

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jboggan
I'm happy that this project is coming along. I never had any contact with the
physical/chip team but I did attempt to contribute something to the theory
group in a 20% project. It was absolutely the best and most challenging work I
had during my stint at Google, and I can definitely say the quantum theory
group were the brightest minds I met there.

I think they could be on to something with their approaches, both physical and
theoretical. I could definitely see a QPU in a few years serving a role in
Google Cloud for specific computations. But I don't think that the groups are
currently getting the headcount and engineering power that they need, I think
the worst bottleneck I saw on the theoretical side was a lack of fulltime
engineers to test and implement the researcher's awesome ideas. I'm hoping
that gets more attention and resources, because I think Google might actually
be sitting on another goldmine here.

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johncolanduoni
If you want to read the paper laying out the plan the article is referring to,
it's here:
[https://arxiv.org/abs/1608.00263](https://arxiv.org/abs/1608.00263)

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smichel17
When "reach a milestone in computing history" is written 4 times before
getting to the content (hn title, article title, article summary, first
sentence of article), the article feels a lot like click bait, which really
discourages me from wanting to give it any of my time. Anyone want to write a
tldr?

~~~
johncolanduoni
Martinis' group has laid out a plan to build a 49 qubit quantum computer that
can solve a problem that is intractable for classical supercomputers with any
known algorithm. If they pull it off we'll have the first provisional evidence
that we can build quantum computers that can solve a problem classical
computers cannot in a reasonable amount of time.

Caveats: it is possible there exists a superior classical algorithm that can
solve the problem efficiently enough, and that we just haven't found it yet.
It is also still within the realm of possibility that there exists an
algorithm that can simulate any quantum computer with only polynomial
slowdown, which would show quantum computers are not drastically faster for
any problem.

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mck-
I'm surprised there is no mention of D-Wave systems - the quantum computer
that Google bought a while ago [1] and how/why they decided to build it
themselves from scratch.

[1] [https://www.quora.com/How-much-did-Google-pay-for-the-
quantu...](https://www.quora.com/How-much-did-Google-pay-for-the-quantum-
computer-from-D-Wave)

~~~
marcosdumay
The D-Wave is not a quantum computer in the meaning that term usually has.

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frik
Wake me up when it's ready. For two decades we hear announcements that Quantum
Computers are almost ready.

Yet beside bluffs and prototypes that require superconductor with very cold
-230° C to do little, none of them resurfaced later.

Quantum Computers can be exiting and devastating. What happens if the first
company/state keeps it a trade secrete and uses Quantum Computers without
telling the rest of the world? (what if...) With Quantum Computers all the
"secure digital stuff" of today can be broken, say good bye to your cloud
online security. A good/bad actor can read everything. We should think about
how to mitigate this issue, isn't it?

~~~
nradov
Plenty of people have been thinking about it for years and developing
encryption algorithms which should remain secure even if someone manages to
build a working quantum computer.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-
quantum_cryptography](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-
quantum_cryptography)

~~~
frik
Good link. Nevertheless HTTPS/HTTP2/TLS/bcrypt/MD5/SHA-256/AES/etc need an
upgrade/replacement to be ready for day X, so the internet isn't really
prepared yet. Also mind all the previously already leaked encrypted data got
harvested by bad actors and is waiting in archives to be easily readable on
day Y.

~~~
wbl
There is a plan. There already are postquantum encryption schemes (and drafts
to use them), and we can wait with signatures for a while. NIST will be making
recommendations soon.

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skdotdan
Are quantum chips supposed to replace the current CPUs and GPUs? Or are they
supposed to be "just" another component that we connect to the CPU, the same
way we connect GPUs?

~~~
manyoso
We are so far from talking about this that your question is nearly
meaningless. Quantum computing has not even been demonstrated yet. This
"quantum supremacy" is for a highly contrived algorithm and set up that has
very little if any real world use cases.

A generalized quantum computer able to run standard computing algorithms is
very far in the future and so much basic research in computing science has to
happen before it can be talked about meaningfully.

~~~
petra
What about quantum machine learning? assuming quantum computers become
powerful tomorrow, won't they be useful in that field?

~~~
kneel
Depends on what you mean by powerful and how that can translate to a
meaningful calculation.

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apexalpha
Ah, now I can finally digitally simultaneously love and hate Google.

~~~
cdibona
Just don't open the box, and we will all be fine.

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indolering
This is still just an annealer, right? Way cool, just nothing beyond what
DWave is offering.

~~~
greeneggs
No, it is more than an annealer. I think they are aiming for a 7 x 7 lattice
of qubits with nearest-neighbor two-qubit gates and one-qubit operations that
are enough for computational universality.

(The noise rates will still be relatively high, and they might not be able to
measure [and reinitialize] qubits at intermediate steps, feeding results back
adaptively. Practically, that would limit using fault tolerance.)

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protomyth
Is there a definitive book explaining Quantum Computing from the ground up?

~~~
wzeng
The best book out there is still Quantum Computation and Quantum Information
by Nielsen and Chuang. It isn't quite current, as it lacks both the advances
in hardware (superconducting qubits) and algorithms (quantum/classical hybrids
& the sampling benchmark that this article is talking about). It's still the
best way to get started as it introduces everything from the linear algebra
all the way up.

I work in quantum computing and it's the book I always recommend.

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sanguy
All wasted on finding the best advert to match to your search terms....

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faragon
I hope that doesn't finish as a "quantum bubble".

