[HN Gopher] Future is quantum: universities look to train engine...
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Future is quantum: universities look to train engineers for an
emerging industry
Author : bookofjoe
Score : 34 points
Date : 2023-11-13 20:22 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nature.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nature.com)
| ecshafer wrote:
| I don't see how you can really get a decent grasp of quantum with
| an undergrad. The standard American physics curriculum has some
| quantum in sophomore year with Modern Physics, and then Quantum
| in Junior/Senior year. But you can't exactly skip mechanics, E&M
| and all of the mathematics (Calc 1-3, Diff EQ, Partial Diff EQ,
| Linear Algebra) you need a background in. So you pretty much need
| 2 years of prep to really start learning. Even if you add some
| specific technology courses around the engineering, how do you
| get around this undergraduate program not being a Physics or
| Applied Physics degree, without throwing the baby out with the
| bathwater?
| westurner wrote:
| You can do applied quantum logic in an afternoon (with e.g.
| colab and cirq, qiskit, and/or tequila) but then how much math
| is necessary; what is a "real conjugate"?
| esafak wrote:
| In the same way you an "do ML" without knowing linear algebra
| and probability theory. Such people can barely extend
| anything, let alone design new models from scratch.
| westurner wrote:
| E.g. Quantum embedding isn't yet taught to undergrads, and
| can be quickly explained to folks interested in the field,
| who might not be deterred by laborious newspaper
| summarizations, and who might pursue this strategic and
| critical skill.
|
| How many ways are there to roll a 6-sided die with qubits
| and quantum embedding?
|
| It took years for tech to completely and entirely rid
| itself of the socially-broken nerd stereotypes that
| pervaded early digital computing as well.
|
| How can we get enough people into QIS Quantum fields to
| supply demand for new talent?
| shortrounddev2 wrote:
| How many people need to design new models from scratch
| though
| esafak wrote:
| "When are we ever going to need maths?" said the high
| schooler.
|
| You use the skills you have.
| packetlost wrote:
| You don't really need a deep background in the physics side of
| things to utilize or help build quantum systems. Most of
| quantum is serious, but still "traditional", engineering of
| various disciplines (RF, EE, OMECH, CS, etc.). The physics part
| is a comparatively small portion of it IME.
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| I took all these courses as a non physics aligned computer
| science major in a top engineering program. I even had the
| theoretical probability and statistics requirements you need
| too. The fact was though that are base requirements meant if
| you came in without placing out of basic requirements like
| calculus 1, intro physics, etc, you were going to be there for
| six years or five years plus summers. This wasn't technically
| allowed by they waved hands somehow and it was tolerated by the
| university system. I feel I had enough background to study a
| year of progressive quantum computing courses successfully (but
| didn't as they weren't available).
|
| Of course in the last decade or so they relaxed a lot of non
| computer science requirements and offered more elective slots,
| dumbing down the requirements and offering greater
| specialization for industry. But my point is, you certainly can
| offer a quantum computing degree with sufficient depth in an
| American university. It'll just be a hard degree.
| dustingetz wrote:
| i think quantum computing will look like web development and
| ML, there will be Djangos and TensorFlow and LangChains and VC
| influencer shills and loads of junior data science roles filled
| by English graduates and there will not be an iota of computer
| science in sight
| prof-dr-ir wrote:
| I think the trick here is quite clear from the article: these
| programs simply do not aim for a "decent grasp of quantum".
| That is at least my take-away from a course that does not
| consider the hydrogen atom "a real-world example"...
| bowsamic wrote:
| The hardest part of QM is relating it back to "actual physics",
| if you work with abstract systems such as qubits, then QM is
| not anywhere near as difficult
| KRAKRISMOTT wrote:
| Excluding Diff Eq, the rest of the mathematics are standard if
| you are doing e.g. machine learning. Diff eqs are not that hard
| to pick up anyways. At higher levels of ML and information
| theory, the math involved in statistical mechanics are covered
| too, for example Ising models are generalized into Hopfield
| networks and message passing/belief propagation. Most of
| quantum computing boils down to a few very specific matrix
| gates. The actual finicky physical details have very little to
| do with the algorithmic implementations. Classical mechanics
| and EM are irrelevant here. You hire quantum computing people
| to figure out the algorithmic and compute stuff, if you want
| somebody to debug waveguides, there are plenty of unemployed EE
| graduates.
| dboreham wrote:
| > I don't see how you can really get a decent grasp of quantum
| with an undergrad.
|
| It's just marketing. The degree will end up being the same as
| Physics. Just you have to take any QM optional classes that
| were always available.
| westurner wrote:
| > _Instead [of the Bohr model], Morello uses a real-world example
| in his teaching -- a material called a quantum dot, which is used
| in some LEDs and in some television screens. "I can now teach
| quantum mechanics in a way that is far more engaging than the way
| I was taught quantum mechanics when I was an undergrad in the
| 1990s," he says._
|
| > _Morello also teaches the mathematics behind quantum mechanics
| in a more computer-friendly way. His students learn to solve
| problems using_ matrices _that they can represent using code
| written for the Python programming language, rather than
| conventional differential equations on paper._
|
| From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30782678 :
|
| >> _This "Quantum Computing for Computer Scientists" video
| https://youtu.be/F_Riqjdh2oM explains classical and quantum
| operators as just matrices. What are other good references?_
|
| Unfortunately the QuantumQ game doesn't yet have the matrix forms
| of the quantum logical operators in the (open source) game docs.
|
| Would be a helpful resource, in addition to the Quantum logic
| wikipedia page and numpy and/or SymPy without cirq:
|
| A Manim presentation demonstrating that quantum logical operator
| matrices are Bloch sphere rotations, are reversible, and why we
| restrict operators to the category of unitary transformations
|
| > _His colleagues at the UNSW are also developing laboratory
| courses to give students hands-on experience with the hardware in
| quantum technologies. For example, they designed a teaching lab
| to convey the fundamental concept of quantum spin, a property of
| electrons and some other quantum particles, using commercially
| available synthetic diamonds known as nitrogen vacancy centres_
|
| Some blue LEDs contain sapphire, which is even more macrostae
| entanglable than diamonds. Lol:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36356444
|
| "The Qubit Game (2022)"
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34574791 :
|
| > _Additional Q12 (K12 QIS Quantum Information Science) ideas?:_
| westurner wrote:
| Cirq and other QIS libraries can implement _repr_svg_ e.g. for
| nice quantum circuit diagrams from code:
| https://github.com/quantumlib/Cirq/issues/2313
|
| A Manim walkthrough that flies from top-down to low flyover
| with the wave states at each point in the circuit would be
| neat. Do classical circuit simulators simulate backwards,
| nonlinear flow of current?
| rgmerk wrote:
| Can somebody involved in the industry give a sense of whether
| there's any reason to get excited about quantum computing?
|
| A lot of the hype seems to come from physicists excited about
| physics (understandably), and spooks who want to crack public key
| encryption.
|
| Can anyone convince me I should care?
| thehumanmeat wrote:
| Quantum ML will be game changing. Running model training on a
| quantum computer can find GLOBAL minima/maxima in fractions of
| a second, depending on the number and quality of the qubits of
| course.
| constantly wrote:
| This comment makes me feel like people talking like this will
| make "quantum" into the new crypto and grift a whole new
| generation of people. The cycle continues.
| frakt0x90 wrote:
| You're a genius. Quantum Blockchain that lets you bid on an
| NFT lootbox being in a particular superposition. Based on
| the probability, the price will be higher or lower. And
| immutable. Or something.
| crazygringo wrote:
| This is my first time ever coming across the phrase
| "quantum blockchain", even if it's a joke.
|
| But I'm suddenly terrified it won't be my last...
| wnevets wrote:
| My new blockchain is protected by Quantum Artificial
| Intelligence(tm). Click here to buy my NFTs.
| Yoric wrote:
| Don't joke about it. I actually think that I've seen this
| claim somewhere.
| __loam wrote:
| I have heard a lot of people talk about how this is going
| to solve np hard problems, but when I asked a cs PhD about
| it they were a lot more pessimistic.
| munk-a wrote:
| Terry Pratchett was ahead of the curve on this one:
|
| > 'And then there's quantum, of course.' The monk sighed.
| 'There's always bloody quantum.'
| aardvark179 wrote:
| I think this sort of comment needs a lot more care and detail
| put into it, and preferably some citations for the algorithms
| you're thinking of.
|
| There's more than enough hype around quantum computing with
| adding to it like this.
| petters wrote:
| To quote the headline of Scott Aaronson's blog: "quantum
| computers won't solve hard problems instantly by just trying
| all solutions in parallel"
| go_elmo wrote:
| New class of computational problems will be solvable. Precisely
| predicting chemical reactions, biological systems etc,
| possibly.
| dboreham wrote:
| Interesting that your question asking for realistic views from
| inside the industry elicited breathless hype comments from
| (presumably) outside the industry.
| vlmutolo wrote:
| I'm starting a PhD in a related field, and it seems like the
| biggest reason to be excited is simulation of small and complex
| physics systems, e.g. molecular interactions.
|
| Breaking RSA/ECDSA is very cool, but doesn't actually enable
| new industries or products. We'll just shift to using different
| cryptography that quantum computing can't break.
|
| Maybe quantum key distribution will become really important in
| some sectors. But if you aren't seriously worried about man-in-
| the-middle attacks on your communications, QKD won't make a
| difference in your life.
|
| But efficiently simulating chemical and physical interactions
| could open up whole industries with advancements in material
| science, pharmaceuticals, etc.
| hutzlibu wrote:
| "But efficiently simulating chemical and physical
| interactions"
|
| Are there real chances, this is going to work reliable
| anytime soon? I don't know much about quantum computing, but
| to me it seems, I rather would bet on GPUs for large
| simulations (as far as I know, currently they are mostly
| calculated on CPUs).
| qntmthrw wrote:
| Yes we have almost managed to factor 21 without precomputing
| the result.
|
| https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-95973-w
|
| At this rate of growth we will be able to factor 27 by the end
| of the century.
| shortrounddev2 wrote:
| But why would someone care about that
| __loam wrote:
| That's the joke
| xhkkffbf wrote:
| He's being sarcastic about the slow progress. They can
| barely factor small numbers like this and that's only after
| assuming that the answer will be 3*7.
| mapmeld wrote:
| I wrote some quantum library code, ended up interviewing with 2
| quantum startups and Amazon's lab at CalTech
|
| For people who've been in the industry for a while, the past 5
| years have been amazing - (small, noisy = NISQ) quantum
| computers are real, there's VC and government money in it.
| Aside from the industries you mentioned, there's interest in
| chemistry and medicine (for example:
| https://www.proteinqure.com ) and you can work with smart
| people. Edit: should also mention post-quantum encryption
| research which is adjacent to this space and in practice at
| Google, Cloudflare, Microsoft.
|
| That said, if I joined a quantum company 2-5 years ago and
| worked long startup hours, I could be disappointed that it's
| not practical yet, and ML / NLP has taken off. So it's up to
| you what your alternatives are and what seems like a "win".
| loxias wrote:
| Disclaimer: I am _NOT_ involved in the industry. I program
| (classical) computers for a living, and have no degrees.
|
| As I understand it, a true power of a quantum computer is
| simulations of quantum systems. A classical supercomputer
| running modeling software (based on DFT?) being replaced by a
| quantum computer I think would be one of the largest (in terms
| of economic impact) early uses of quantum computing.
|
| Drug discovery (small molecule drugs!), materials science,
| anything that would benefit from a substantial/revolutionary
| increase in our computational chemistry reach -- those are the
| reasons I care.
| jujube3 wrote:
| Like fusion research, a breakthrough is only 5 years away.
|
| Unfortunately, also like fusion research, it has also been 5
| years away for the last 30 years.
|
| This is the principle of "time-invariance"
| Yoric wrote:
| I've started recently in a subset of the domain and I feel that
| there is very strong potential in quantum computing, but there
| are still very important fundamental problems that have not
| been solved, so I believe that the hype comes too early.
|
| There are very interesting algorithms that run on existing
| quantum machines. They are quite specialized (don't expect to
| run a quantum videogame any time soon, but expect to be able to
| simulate large physical systems or networks or power grids,
| etc.) but such algorithms could, if we had a sufficient number
| of stable qbits, solve problems that require entire
| datacenters, faster and with machines that require only a few
| times the energy of a desktop PC. However, no machine has a
| sufficient number of stable qbits, and it's currently unclear
| how to build machines that both have sufficient qbits _and_ can
| run the same algorithms.
|
| In a way, we're currently where traditional computing was in
| the early 50s. There is a feeling that all the difficult
| problems have been solved and the race is on between ~40
| companies to be the first to build such machines. Everybody's
| marketing department claims to have the solution (or even to
| have working machines that can run these algorithms), but to
| the best of my knowledge, nobody has demonstrated them. There
| is a feeling that quantum computing will change the world. But
| I doubt it will happen overnight.
| dayjaby wrote:
| Is 100% stable qbits that much of a requirement? I had the
| impression that allowing some instability (which you have in
| any real physical environment) is good for running any kind
| of approximative algorithms, i.e. algorithms that give you a
| good enough solution with a high enough probability.
| munk-a wrote:
| I can't really, there are some really exciting scientific
| things that may emerge in the new few years but anything
| related to consumer electronics is at least fifteen years off
| and will probably have quite slow adoption when it's available
| - that's especially true for anything security related.
| bsder wrote:
| > Can anyone convince me I should care?
|
| Doubtful.
|
| Problem 1: Qubits don't scale.
|
| By contrast, it took roughly 10 years from the invention of the
| transistor in 1947 to a 30,000 transistor computer (IBM 7070 in
| 1958) and a fully functional 100 transistor MOSFET chip in
| 1964.
|
| Even vacuum tubes went from Triode invention in 1906 to Flip-
| Flop in 1918 to a computer in 1939 _while discovering quantum
| mechanics at the same time_.
|
| Qubits are barely at 1000 in 2023 (invented at roughly 1988 but
| with a lot of groundwork beforehand) and they barely work.
| Progress on increasing that has been very slow.
|
| Qubits are still a research problem and not an engineering
| problem.
|
| Problem 2: Problems and algorithms don't map as easily as
| everybody claims
|
| There's a lot of "Algorithm X is faster in Quantum than
| Classical."
|
| A lot of those claims are of the form "If we can build quantum
| circuit P, D, and Z, we can map Algorithm X to a Quantum
| Computer." And a lot of those assumptions are, quite bluntly,
| bullshit. We can't build circuit P, D, or Z and make it work so
| it doesn't matter how well the theorists can map the algorithm.
|
| This also all presupposes we don't have better classical
| algorithms. Whenever I talk to quantum computing folks they
| generally point out that the one thing we have a hope of
| mapping to quantum solidly, factoring, is an odd man out in the
| way it maps. A couple of them think that there's still some
| missing knowledge in classical algorithms around that.
| prof-dr-ir wrote:
| The role of quantum mechanics was originally to describe the
| behavior of individual atoms and molecules. This is the way of
| the Schrodinger equation or matrix mechanics, the harmonic
| oscillator, the hydrogen atom, infinite-dimensional Hilbert
| spaces, quantization, and so on. I would like to call it
| "hermitian" quantum mechanics since the Hamiltonian is a
| hermitian operator.
|
| Then there is the quantum mechanics which describes engineered
| quantum systems like quantum dots and quantum logic gates. Here
| time evolution is in discrete steps, Hilbert spaces are finite-
| dimensional, and probabilities are discrete instead of
| continuous. I think it is apt to call this "unitary" quantum
| mechanics since one essentially only considers exponentiated
| Hamiltonians.
|
| It is important not to confuse the two. If you know hermitian
| quantum mechanics then unitary quantum mechanics is conceptually
| straightforward. If you know unitary quantum mechanics then you
| will have a lot of new concepts and mathematics to learn before
| you understand hermitian quantum mechanics (but of course you may
| know more about applications).
|
| The programs mentioned in the article teach unitary quantum
| mechanics: sufficient for engineering, insufficient for physics.
| If we assume that the engineering world is becoming increasingly
| quantum then it is perhaps not a bad thing.
| elashri wrote:
| There is radioactivity which was (and still) one of the most
| important aspects in physics (nuclear physics) and it is mainly
| about describing decaying state. This is using non-hermitian
| QM. Because of hermitian operators giving always real
| eigenvalues (This exercise is left to the reader) we can see
| (and prove) that non hermitian operators will give rise to
| complex eigenvalues whose imaginary eigenvalues mean that the
| probability of finding the particle decreases exponentially
| with time (decay).
|
| That is actually an approximation that will violate the QM
| postulate that evolution shouls be unitary (and probability is
| not conserved obviously).
|
| People who study that in a more rigorous way will go and define
| somehow bigger Hilbert space that not only include the particle
| (atom) but will also include the decay products and only when
| you solve the system with the states of mother plus daughters
| you will return to your ordinary simple/ish quantum mechanics.
|
| The idea is that the decrease of probability of finding the
| particle will be opposed by increasing probability of finding
| decay products. So the total probability will be conserved and
| we will have unitary time operator.
|
| Hint: It is not simple as ordinary QM when you sometimes have
| to worry about resonances, mixed states and modeling these
| things mathematically is much difficult that solving your
| ordinary hermitian hamiltonian.
| politician wrote:
| Since when have universities pivoted from training for academia
| to training for industry?
|
| While I was in university, the classic undergraduate Computer
| Science program was described to me by the program's advisors as
| being for academics. If I recall correctly, "those who get A's
| become professors, those who get C's go into industry."
| djtango wrote:
| Since progression in academia slowed due to limited number of
| professorships and the salary gap of academics to people in
| industry sky rocketed.
| shortrounddev2 wrote:
| That seems like a perverse incentive. "Those who get As become
| low-wage adjuncts and those who get Cs end up with some of the
| highest salaries in the country". Feels like getting an A is a
| good way to end up nowher
| lossolo wrote:
| So which is it? Reading the last few HN threads about quantum
| computers gave me the impression that we don't even know if there
| will be any practical use for them, as they seem super
| specialized, and there are technical challenges that no one knows
| how to solve. I'm confused.
| klyrs wrote:
| Purely speaking to the article, which is about careers. The
| open question is how much money will be put into the industry
| before payoff/abandonment. But the industry kicked off over 20
| years ago and the trajectory looks great.
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