[HN Gopher] IBM Quantum System Two
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IBM Quantum System Two
Author : mtillman
Score : 52 points
Date : 2023-01-18 07:03 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (newsroom.ibm.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (newsroom.ibm.com)
| renox wrote:
| So what's the maximum number it can factorize?
| tromp wrote:
| We would hear about it if it could break the current record of
| 21...
| asow92 wrote:
| Where is a good place (if there is one) to learn about quantum
| software engineering concepts?
| marius_k wrote:
| https://quantum.country/
|
| it has built-in spaced repetition cards
| nerdo wrote:
| https://qiskit.org/textbook/preface.html
| GavCo wrote:
| This podcast episode is great as a high-level introduction
| https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/147-quantum-computing-...
| abrichr wrote:
| Serious question: is there any reason to trust anything IBM does
| or says isn't vaporware? In recent memory I am only familiar with
| failed projects that received copious media praise (eg Watson,
| BlueMix).
|
| The only project I know of that was genuinely successful is Deep
| Blue. What successes have they had since then?
| rbanffy wrote:
| There is successful tech in the "tech that does what says on
| the box" and in "achieves good market fit".
|
| A lot of their stuff does 1, but not 2.
|
| And their mainframes, underhyped to the extreme, that more or
| less still run the world.
| rosebay wrote:
| I didn't know IBM mainframes run the world? Just curious,
| care to expand?
| dekhn wrote:
| many of the most core US IT infrastructure projects-
| government and commercial- depend on IBM 360 assembly code
| or another IBM system, written decades ago that has been
| repeatedly scaled to handle the increase in load.
|
| Two I can think of: SABRE and the IRS. See more here:
| https://www.nextgov.com/cxo-briefing/2016/05/10-oldest-it-
| sy...
|
| Personally I have a ton of respect for production systems
| that can be scaled in place for 50 years. But I don't have
| any interest in learning to run IBM mainframes or code for
| them- I'm preparing for lots of contract work in 2037.
| nerdo wrote:
| Banks run the world, IBM mainframes run the banks.
| dralley wrote:
| >IBM mainframes run the banks.
|
| And the airlines, and the logistics companies
| sophacles wrote:
| That's a bit unfair to the insurance companies. They have
| a pretty big say in what happens and also run mainframes.
| Chabsff wrote:
| Kinda-Sorta. It depends on what you mean by "success". IBM has
| been doing a commendable job at managing expectations wrt/
| quantum computing. e.g. from this very article:
|
| "The new 433 qubit 'Osprey' processor brings us a step closer
| to the point where quantum computers will be used to tackle
| previously unsolvable problems,"
|
| So we can reliably expect them to ship what they are
| promissing. However, there is still a _massive_ skew between
| what QC brings to the table vs what the public (and investors)
| are expecting from it. At the current trend, anything QC-
| related is effectively guaranteed to qualify as vaporwave due
| to the public at large being mislead on the subject for so
| long.
| Jabbles wrote:
| _This processor has the potential to run complex quantum
| computations well beyond the computational capability of any
| classical computer._
|
| I don't think that manages expectations well, the word
| "potential" is doing a lot of work.
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| Power architecture chips, but that's from a no-need-for-
| marketing-embellishments classical realm.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power10
|
| for an example that is current
| sophacles wrote:
| Those flagship projects that failed technologically were
| amazing successes.
|
| > received copious media praise
|
| That's the success criteria.
|
| IBM makes money in lots of ways. The last few decades they've
| struggled with public perception, and an image of being "has-
| been". This has hurt their ability to get talent and enter new
| markets. Having your name next to neat, futuristic tech is a
| good way to counter that image. Even more so when it's things
| like Watson and Quantum computing that have real nerds doing
| actual fawning over the tech.
| kvathupo wrote:
| Although I'm not up to date on the most recent industry
| developments, I'd say to be less concerned about the number of
| qubits, and more concerned about the gate fidelity and qubit
| coherence. Certainly, you want a quantum computer that you can
| actually use [1]! It's also important to distinguish between
| the adiabatic quantum computing of companies like D-Wave with
| their many qubits and the gate-based quantum computing of
| Google, IonQ, IBM, etc. with their fewer qubits.
|
| [1] - https://arxiv.org/abs/2110.03137
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| Was Watson a scam? I mean the jeapordy AI, not all the
| completely unrelated projects they gave the same name later.
| Chabsff wrote:
| Consider that the Jeopardy stunt was basically a sales pitch
| saying: "If it can do that for Jeopardy, then just imagine
| what it can do for you!"
|
| There is definitely an argument to be made that this was an
| empty promise. Not necessarily enough to call it a "scam",
| but vaporware...
| qbasic_forever wrote:
| I don't think it was an outright scam, but its use in medical
| analysis turned out to be very poor:
| https://qz.com/2129025/where-did-ibm-go-wrong-with-watson-
| he...
|
| Definitely over-hyped technology. Probably not a scam though.
| kvathupo wrote:
| In light of the large language models from Vaswani et al.,
| I'm curious if anyone could chime in:
|
| 1. Does Watson incorporate any deep learning?
|
| 2. If not, why? Were disagreements based in business or
| theory?
| low_tech_punk wrote:
| Are we post-RSA yet?
| wahern wrote:
| If and when it happens, ECC will be broken before RSA, as the
| latter requires 1 or 2 orders of magnitude more qubits for the
| same classical computing complexity. Given how difficult it
| seems to be to scale quantum computers, there's likely to be a
| years-long period between ECC being deemed too risky and RSA
| remaining viable, at least for some tasks.
|
| This might (depending on the precise numbers) also be an
| argument for Curve448 over Curve25519, apropos a recent Golang
| crypto project rejection of Curve448. Notably, upgrading to a
| stronger curve is much more difficult from a logistics
| standpoint because you have to explicitly add code for each
| curve to various libraries, and then roll them out globally.
| Generic curve libraries never took hold after side-channel
| attacks became common. Whereas for RSA larger keys are trivial
| to support through a simple parameter, and generally already
| supported by deployed software. Some RSA libraries currently
| cap out at 8192, 65536, or some such for pragmatic reasons
| (e.g. limiting computational complexity attacks or static loop
| unrolling), but by comparison this is much, much easier to
| remedy.
|
| Of course, larger keys only buys you a little time. But it will
| be a mad scramble when (and if!) it happens, so that time will
| be very valuable, and much money will be changing hands.
| jimmar wrote:
| I watched some of the presentations at their recent quantum
| summit. They have smart people building sophisticated systems,
| but they struggled to define meaningful use cases for quantum
| computing.
|
| I've noticed a "tell" for when product launches will likely fail.
| If the presenter cannot create a strong argument for the product,
| but instead tells the audience some version of, "we're excited to
| see what use cases you create for our product," then the product
| is likely to fail. IBM did this several times at the Quantum
| summit. It's basically saying, "Here's a thing. Hopefully you can
| find something useful to do with it, because we can't. But here
| are our hardware specs."
|
| I'll pay more attention when IBM and other quantum players start
| to talk about applications more than numbers of qubits.
| dekhn wrote:
| My favorite are the press releases from companies that say they
| need a quantum computer to do logistics and routing. I'm still
| waiting to see one of the solutions the QC came up with that
| couldn't have been produced by a modern constraint solver or
| heuristic router for 1/100th the cost and time.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| > "we're excited to see what use cases you create for our
| product,"
|
| The killer feature of the iPhone is making phone calls.
| jandrese wrote:
| LASERs had the same problem when they were first invented. It
| took serious cost reductions before they became practical
| outside of laboratory environments. Now they are everywhere. I
| think Quantum computing is currently in the same place. The
| systems just aren't practical yet, but if they survive and
| iterate a few more times it could be revolutionary.
| Chabsff wrote:
| Revolutionise what?
|
| Sure, we can hand-wave away that it'll revolutionise
| *something*, but there's no direct candidate on the horizon.
| As of today, at best we can hope that more accurate quantum
| simulations could lead to some breakthrough tech, but that's
| a very indirect revolution at best.
|
| With LASER, at least, there was a bunch of known use-cases
| that were blocked by the availability of the tech. There are
| no such equivalents here.
| ejiblabahaba wrote:
| Aside from the much-touted uses in cryptography, probably
| the biggest use will be as universal quantum simulators. A
| lot of quantum simulations are infeasible beyond trivial
| interactions, because the classical memory and number of
| computations required to capture and progress the state of
| the quantum system grows exponentially with each
| interacting element in the system. Simplifying
| exponentially increasing memory/computation time
| requirements to linearly increasing qubit/simulation time
| requirements will make a lot of chemistry and material
| science way easier.
| pooloo wrote:
| If you build it, they will come...
|
| Most of the time, technology that is leading edge is only
| there for a short period, as its either bought out or lacks
| funding. With IBM, they have the funds to start
| revolutions, and have a larger vision at play. However,
| quantum computing is not a widely accepted concept due to a
| lot of its complexities, which is likely why its such a
| niche area. Given time and money, which IBM can handle,
| something will happen.
| [deleted]
| mabbo wrote:
| The Quantum Algorithm Zoo website[0] gives some examples of
| problems where the quantum algorithm is much faster than
| the classical one.
|
| My own view is that for a lot of (but not all[1]) problems
| for which we have a quantum algorithm improvement, we maybe
| already have a heuristic that gets us 95% of the way there
| just as quickly. So the application of a QC on these
| problems is buying us a massive speedup, but only if you
| need to get the perfect, optimal answer. And sometimes you
| do!
|
| [0]https://quantumalgorithmzoo.org/
|
| [1]Factoring large primes is a good counter example.
| inasio wrote:
| An issue highlighted there is that there are very few
| algorithms where you have an exponential advantage vs
| classical hardware
| XorNot wrote:
| I recently had the opportunity to talk to the head of a company
| which is trying to build quantum computers. It's very obviously
| a spin off from a university to provide a way to keep their
| better Ph. D students employed and researching but not on
| University payroll (i.e. with the various requirements that
| entails).
|
| Basically her opinion was they were 10 years at least away from
| meaningfully getting beyond _4_ practical qubits with their
| technology, and weren 't worried about it because everyone
| reporting more are using hundreds to thousands of qubits to
| error correct out to get the 60 or so they report using in
| calculations (their technology value add was that they could do
| with a lot less error correction).
|
| The overall take away I got was quantum computers aren't
| "imminent" - they're 30 years away at minimum, probably more.
| The company exists because it's important basic research, but
| it's definitely not a "commercial products soon" endeavor - it
| was basically a way to fund focused research on a particular
| method.
| kvathupo wrote:
| I think the battle to promote the use of quantum computers is
| rendered even more difficult by the fact that their raison
| d'etre of "being faster than classical computers" requires one
| to further develop the existing field of complexity analysis
| for classical computers. Indeed, it's difficult to fairly
| compare the gate/oracle-based complexity of quantum computers
| to the iterations/multiplications/etc-based complexity of
| classical computers, especially if we don't know their
| complexity in the first place [1]!
|
| [1] - Recently, there has been interest in the complexity
| analysis of deep learning NNs: https://arxiv.org/abs/1811.03962
|
| Further Reading:
|
| * Church-Turing Thesis for quantum computers -
| https://quantumcomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/6088/wh...
|
| * Quantum Turing Machine -
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_Turing_machine
| dclowd9901 wrote:
| Why would they cover up that beautiful machine with an ugly gray
| box?
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