[HN Gopher] Data manipulations alleged in study that paved way f...
___________________________________________________________________
Data manipulations alleged in study that paved way for Microsoft's
quantum chip
Author : EvgeniyZh
Score : 186 points
Date : 2025-05-09 11:23 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.science.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.science.org)
| krastanov wrote:
| This is such a beautiful theoretical idea (a type of "natural"
| error correction which protects the qubits without having to deal
| with the exorbitant overhead of error correcting codes). It is
| very disheartening and discouraging and just plain exhausting
| that there has been so much "data manipulation" in this subfield
| (see all the other retracted papers from the last 5 years
| mentioned in the article). I can only imagine how hard this must
| be on the junior scientists on the team who have been swept into
| it without much control.
| pc86 wrote:
| Hopefully people are keeping lists of the PIs on these redacted
| papers and keeping that in mind for future grants, hiring, etc.
| I know almost nobody is, but one can hope.
|
| Academic fraud ranging from plagiarism to outright faking data
| should, more often than not, make it basically impossible for
| you to get _any_ academic job whatsoever, in your field or
| others.
|
| This chip is an extreme example, but potentially millions of
| dollars of productivity, hundreds or even thousands of people
| spending months or years on something based in a fabrication.
|
| The person or people directly responsible for this should never
| work again.
| jakobgm wrote:
| Totally agree! As with any behavior which is difficult to
| detect and often goes by unnoticed; the punishment should be
| large enough for the expected value of fraud being clearly
| net negative for those that might feel tempted at "tweaking
| some numbers".
|
| In case anybody else also isn't familiar with "PI" as an
| abbreviation in this context:
|
| > In many countries, the term principal investigator (PI)
| refers to the holder of an independent grant and the lead
| researcher for the grant project, usually in the sciences,
| such as a laboratory study or a clinical trial.
|
| Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal_investigator
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| >Academic fraud ranging from plagiarism to outright faking
| data should, more often than not, make it basically
| impossible for you to get any academic job whatsoever, in
| your field or others.
|
| That might actually be a perverse incentive. If you've
| already nuked your career with some fraud, you can't make it
| worse by extra fraud... why ever stop? People inclined to do
| this sort of thing, when faced with that deterrent just
| double down and commit even more fraud, they figure the best
| that can be hoped for is to do it so much and so perfectly
| that they're never discovered.
|
| The trouble is that the system for science worked well when
| there exists only some tiny number of scientists, but now
| we're a planet of 8 billion and where people tell their
| children they have to go to college and get a STEM degree.
| Hell, you can only become a scientist by producing new
| research, even if there's not much left to research in your
| field. And the only way to maintain that position as a
| scientist is "to publish or perish". We have finite avenues
| of research with an ever-growing population of scientists,
| bullshit is inevitable.
| dullcrisp wrote:
| You stop because you can't get a job?
| pc86 wrote:
| Even if "bullshit is inevitable" is true -- I don't think
| it is -- that doesn't mean we shouldn't punish people who
| make up data, who steal others' work, who steal grant money
| by using their fake data to justify future grants.
|
| "Well there's lots of people now" is not really a great
| justification. You become a low trust society by allowing
| trust to deteriorate. That happens in part because you
| choose not to punish people who violate that trust in the
| first place.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| >that doesn't mean we shouldn't punish people who make up
| data,
|
| I am not wishy-washy on punishment. A part of me that I
| do not deny nor suppress wants punishment for those who
| do wrong.
|
| But sometimes punishments are counter-productive. The
| easiest example is the death penalty for heinous, non-
| murder crimes. This incentivizes the rapist or child
| molester (or whatever) to kill the victim. You can't
| execute them twice, after all, so if they're already on
| the hook for a death penalty crime, murdering their
| victim also gets rid of a prime witness who could get
| them the death penalty by testifying, but without
| increasing the odds of the death penalty.
|
| "Career death penalty" here is like that.
|
| >"Well there's lots of people now" is not really a great
| justification.
|
| It wasn't meant to be a justification. It was an
| explanation of the problem, and (in part, at least) and
| attempt to show that things need to change if we want the
| fraud to go away.
|
| >You become a low trust society by allowing trust to
| deteriorate
|
| We've been a low trust society for a long time now.
| People need to start thinking about how to accomplish the
| long, slow process of changing a low trust society to a
| high trust one.
| hollerith wrote:
| >We've been a low trust society for a long time now.
|
| Although trust has been decreasing, the US remains a
| high-trust society compared to the global average.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > We've been a low trust society for a long time now.
| People need to start thinking about how to accomplish the
| long, slow process of changing a low trust society to a
| high trust one.
|
| The core problem is that most people define their self-
| worth by their employment, and no matter what, this is
| all going to crash hard due to automation. The generation
| currently in power is doing everything they can to deny
| and downplay what is about to happen, instead of helping
| our societies prepare.
|
| We're all being thrown into the rat race, it is being
| told to us verbally and in personal experience that there
| is no alternative than to become the top dog at all costs
| because that will be the only chance to survive once
| automation truly hits home. The result is that those who
| have the feeling they have failed the rat race and have
| no hope of catching up withdraw from the "societal
| contract" and just do whatever they want, at the expense
| of others if need be.
| kevinventullo wrote:
| In the case of academia, I'm fine with harsh punishment
| for people who fabricate data, even if it does
| incentivize them to be more brazen with their
| fabrications in the short term. Makes it easier to catch
| them!
|
| The fact is, we don't want these people in academia at
| all. You want researchers who are naturally inclined not
| to fabricate data, not people who only play by the rules
| because they think they're otherwise going to get caught.
| nathan_compton wrote:
| My hunch is that these double down types won't be dissuaded
| by much of anything. I think fundamentally this kind of
| person has a risk taking personality and often feels they
| will get away with it.
| nextos wrote:
| > Academic fraud ranging from plagiarism to outright faking
| data should, more often than not, make it basically
| impossible for you to get any academic job whatsoever, in
| your field or others.
|
| Sadly, the system is often rewarding fake or, especially,
| exaggerated/misrepresented data and conclusions. I think that
| a significant proportion of articles exaggerate findings and
| deliberately cherry-pick data.
|
| It's a market of lemons. Proving misrepresentation is really
| hard, and the rewards for doing so are immense. Publishing an
| article in _Nature_ , _Science_ , or _Cell_ is a career-
| defining moment.
| pc86 wrote:
| Yeah I agree it's not an easy problem to solve by any
| stretch. I'm not a professor or scientist so I won't
| pretend to understand the intricacies of journal
| publication and that sort of thing.
|
| But I do wonder when someone's PhD thesis gets published
| and it turns out they plagiarized large parts of it, why
| isn't their degree revoked? When someone is a professor at
| a prestigious institution and they fabricate data, why are
| they still teaching the following year?
| nextos wrote:
| Serious universities do often revoke doctoral degrees if
| plagiarism is proven. I've seen Oxford University going
| as far as demanding someone to issue a correction of a
| journal article to cite prior work because they were
| making some claims of novelty that were not true.
|
| > When someone is a professor at a prestigious
| institution and they fabricate data, why are they still
| teaching the following year?
|
| Internal politics. Committees judging potential
| misconduct are not independent. If you are sufficiently
| high up in the ladder, you can get away with many things.
| Sweden recently created a Swedish National Board for
| Assessment of Research Misconduct (Npof) to address this
| problem. I think this is a step in the right direction.
|
| But, ultimately, I think academic fraud should be judged
| in court. However, e.g. Leonid Schneider
| (forbetterscience.com) has been taken to court several
| times for reporting fraud, including fraud that led to
| patient death, and some judges didn't seem to care much
| about data fabrication / misrepresentation.
| MeteorMarc wrote:
| Or get rehabilitated, like Leo Kouwenhoven, see
| https://delta.tudelft.nl/article/gerehabiliteerde-
| kouwenhove...
| 77pt77 wrote:
| I missed the redemption.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| This would be half of the nsf grants according to the
| replication crisis work.
| christkv wrote:
| So the chip is a paperweight ?
| pelagicAustral wrote:
| I propose everything is a paperweight until you show an
| implementation.
| nottorp wrote:
| Its 5 years away, just like cold fusion and AI.
| whynotmaybe wrote:
| We've had cold fusion for years :
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_ColdFusion
|
| And while searching for this silly joke, I'm now baffled by
| the fact that it's still alive !
| nottorp wrote:
| For every framework that ever existed there's somewhere out
| there a computer running it and doing real work with it,
| without any updates since autumn 1988, while the google
| wannabe solo founders worry about the best crutch^H^H^H^H
| tooling, their CI/CDs and not scaling.
| russianGuy83829 wrote:
| that's going to be a banger bobbybroccoli video
| _heimdall wrote:
| Unpopular opinion I'm sure, but I very much quantum today as
| smoke and mirrors. I've tried to dive down that rabbit hole and I
| keep finding myself in a sea of theoretical mathematics that
| seems to fall into the "give me one miracle" category.
|
| I expect this won't be the last time we hear about quantum
| research that has been foundational to a lot of work turns out to
| have been manipulated, or designed poorly and unverified by other
| research labs.
| yesbut wrote:
| It is all a scam. The research side is interesting for what it
| is, but the idea of having any type of useful "quantum
| computer" is sci-fi make believe. The grifters will keep
| stringing investors and these large corporations along for as
| long as possible. Total waste of resources.
| roflmaostc wrote:
| Why do you think so?
|
| Your words sounds like what people said in the 40s and 50s
| about computers.
| skywhopper wrote:
| Do you have any citations for that?
| reaperducer wrote:
| _Do you have any citations for that?_
|
| I'm not the OP, but when you're of a certain age, you
| don't need citations for that. Memory serves. And my
| family was saying those sorts of things and teasing me
| about being into computers as late as the 1970's.
| DangitBobby wrote:
| I would actually like to read about that, though.
| Henchman21 wrote:
| When you're of a certain age, time has likely blurred
| your memories. Citation becomes more important then.
| Source: me I'm an old SOB.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _Source: me I'm an old SOB._
|
| By your own criteria, a citation better than "me" is
| needed.
| pessimizer wrote:
| Looks like you've got it.
| autoexec wrote:
| I can attest to the fact that people who didn't
| understand computers at all were questioning the value of
| spending time on them long after the 1970s. The issue is
| that there are people today who do understand quantum
| computing that are questioning their value and that's not
| a great sign.
| roflmaostc wrote:
| https://www.ittc.ku.edu/~evans/stuff/famous.html
| lucianbr wrote:
| Survivor bias. Just because a certain thing seemed like a
| scam and turned out useful does not mean all things that
| seem like a scam will turn out useful.
| monooso wrote:
| GP's comment didn't suggest that _every_ supposed scam
| will turn out to be useful.
|
| Quite the opposite, in fact. It was pointing out that
| _some_ supposed scams do turn out to be useful.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| GP is just blatantly wrong. Electronic computation was
| NEVER considered a "scam".
|
| The Navy, Air Force, government, private institutions,
| etc didn't dump billions of funding into computers
| because they thought they were overrated.
| RhysabOweyn wrote:
| I don't think that you can really make that comparison.
| "Conventional" computers had more proven practical usage
| (especially by nation states) in the 40s/50s than quantum
| computing does today.
| empath75 wrote:
| By the 1940s and 50s, computers were already being used for
| practical and useful work, and calculating machines had a
| _long_ history of being useful, and it didn't take that
| long between the _idea_ of a calculating machine and having
| something that people paid for and used because it had
| practical value.
|
| They've been plugging along at quantum computers for
| decades now and have not produced a single useful machine
| (although a lot of the math and science behind it has been
| useful for theoretical physics).
| os2warpman wrote:
| In the 40s and 50s programmable general-purpose electronic
| computers were solving problems.
|
| Ballistics tables, decryption of enemy messages, and more.
| Early programmable general-purpose electronic computers,
| from the moment they were turned on could solve problems in
| minutes that would take human computers months or years. In
| the 40s, ENIAC proved the feasibility of thermonuclear
| weaponry.
|
| By 1957 the promise and peril of computing entered popular
| culture with the Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn film
| "Desk Set" where a computer is installed in a library and
| runs amok, firing everybody, all while romantic shenanigans
| occur. It was sponsored by IBM and is one of the first
| instances of product placement in films.
|
| People knew "electronic brains" were the future the second
| they started spitting out printouts of practically
| unsolvable problems instantly-- they just didn't (during
| your timeframe) predict the invention and adoption of the
| transistor and its miniaturization, which made computers
| ubiquitous household objects.
|
| Even the quote about the supposed limited market for
| computers trotted out from time-to-time to demonstrate the
| hesitance of industry and academia to adopt computers is
| wrong.
|
| In 1953 when Thomas Watson said that "there's only a market
| for five computers" what he actually said was "When we
| developed the IBM 701 we created a customer list of 20
| organizations who might want it and because it is so
| expensive we expected to only sign five deals, but we ended
| up signing 18" (paraphrased).
|
| Militaries, universities, and industry all wanted all of
| the programmable general-purpose electronic computers they
| could afford the second it became available because they
| all knew that it could solve problems.
|
| Included for comparison is a list of problems that quantum
| computing has solved:
| belter wrote:
| You can't put a man on the Sun just because you put one on
| the Moon.
| Mistletoe wrote:
| I became disillusioned when I learned that 5x3=15 was the
| largest number that has been factored by a quantum computer
| without tricks or scams. Then I became even more
| disillusioned when I learned the 15 may not be legit...
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/QuantumComputing/comments/1535lii/w.
| ..
| cess11 wrote:
| IBM has given the public access to qubits for close to a
| decade, including a free tier, and as far as I know it
| produced a stream of research articles that fizzled out
| several years ago and nothing generally useful.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Quantum_Platform
| AndrewStephens wrote:
| In 2001, a pure quantum computer using Shor's algorithm
| correctly gave the prime factors of 15. In 2012 they managed to
| find the prime factors of 21. Since then, everyone has given up
| on the purely quantum approach by using lots of traditional
| CPU-time to preprocess the input, somewhat defeating the
| purpose.
|
| Its a shame. I was really looking forward to finding out what
| the prime factors of 34 are.
| JohnKemeny wrote:
| If I understand correctly, they didn't actually _find_ the
| prime factors, they merely verified them, so it 's
| unfortunately up to you to factor 34. Maybe some time in the
| future a quantum machine can verify whether you were right.
| teekert wrote:
| It's 2 and 17, I asked Claude.
| Lionga wrote:
| Not sure if it was more wasteful of energy asking Claude
| or trying to solve it with Quantum.
| solardev wrote:
| A twelve year old could do it for 500 kcal of cookies.
| tomashubelbauer wrote:
| I volunteer as a tribute
| pfdietz wrote:
| Reminds me of the Groucho Marx line: "A child of five
| could understand this. Send someone to fetch a child of
| five."
| rbanffy wrote:
| At least quantum computers are cool.
| RHSeeger wrote:
| We could ask Claude to generate the schematics for a
| quantum computer that can find the prime factors of 21.
| Then we get the best of both worlds.
| AndrewStephens wrote:
| AI can do that now? Looks like I have to upgrade all of
| my 5-bit SSL keys.
| xxs wrote:
| >5-bit SSL keys.
|
| 34 requires 6 bits, though
| Bootvis wrote:
| Hence the urgency.
| xxs wrote:
| The infamous 21 (which is half of 42) was my 1st thought when
| I heard 'unpopular' which is of course a very popular
| opinion.
| thesz wrote:
| https://eprint.iacr.org/2015/1018.pdf
|
| "As pointed out in [57], there has never been a genuine
| implementation of Shor's algorithm. The only numbers ever to
| have been factored by that type of algorithm are 15 and 21,
| and those factorizations used a simplified version of Shor's
| algorithm that requires one to know the factorization in
| advance..."
|
| If you have a clue what these factors are, you can build an
| implementation of Shor's algorithm for them, I guess.
| EvgeniyZh wrote:
| There was for this year's sigbovik [1]
|
| [1]
| https://fixupx.com/CraigGidney/status/1907199729362186309
| bwfan123 wrote:
| What amazes me is how big tech wants to be in on this
| bandwagon. There is fomo, and each company announces its own
| chip that does something - and nobody knows what. The risk of
| inaction is bigger than the risk of failure.
|
| Meanwhile, a networking company wants to "network" these chips
| - what does that even mean ? And a gpu company produces a
| library for computing with quantum.
|
| Smoke-and-mirrors can carry on for a long time, and fool the
| best of them. Isaac Newton was in on the alchemist bandwagon.
| mepian wrote:
| It is really desperation, the low-hanging fruit of computing
| paradigm shifts to fuel the "tech" industry's growth was
| completely plucked more than a decade ago.
| cjbgkagh wrote:
| AFAIK, in the case of Microsoft, it's less FOMO and more
| about execs being able to impress their peers at other
| companies. So not really a fear of missing out but a desire
| to have an exclusive access to a technology that has already
| been socialized and widely understood to be impressive. It's
| a simple message, 'that impressive thing you've been reading
| about, we're the ones building that'.
| jhallenworld wrote:
| Also: the big company "thought leaders" need something new
| to talk about every year at conferences like "Microsoft
| Ignite" or whatever. These people will push funding into
| things like quantum research just for this. I'm sure
| they're getting lots of mileage out of LLMs these days...
|
| I'm maybe a little jaded having worked on whole products
| that had no market success, but were in fact just so that
| the company had something new to talk about.
| shalg wrote:
| There are exactly 2 reasons we might want quantum networks.
|
| 1. 100% secure communication channels (even better we can
| detect any attempt at eavesdropping and whatever information
| is captured will be useless to the eavesdropper)
|
| 2. Building larger quantum computers. A high fidelity quantum
| network would allow you to compute simultaneously with
| multiple quantum chips by interfacing them.
|
| The thing that makes quantum networking different from
| regular networking is that you have to be very careful to not
| disturb the state of the photons you are sending down the
| fiber optics.
|
| Im currently doing my PhD building quantum networking devices
| so im a bit biased but I think it's pretty cool :).
|
| Now does it matter I'm not sure. Reason 1 isn't really that
| useful because encryption is very secure. However if quantum
| computers start to scale up and some encryption methods get
| obsoleted this could be nice. Also having encryption that is
| provably secure would be nice regardless.
|
| Reason 2 at the moment seems like the only path to building
| large scale quantum computing. Think a datacenter with many
| networked quantum chips.
| nativeit wrote:
| I feel like most of your answer was just re-stating the
| question. I'm happy to admit that's almost certainly a mix
| of my ignorance on the topic at hand, and I have been
| primed to view the discussions surrounding quantum
| computing with suspicion, but either way, that's the way it
| reads to this layperson.
| chatmasta wrote:
| If studio execs have their way, Quantum DRM will be the
| killer use case...
| autoexec wrote:
| Jokes on them, we'll just end up creating and using
| quantum pirating systems or even the dreaded Quantum
| Analog Hole to evade it.
| nativeit wrote:
| > 100% secure communication channels (even better we can
| detect any attempt at eavesdropping and whatever
| information is captured will be useless to the
| eavesdropper) chips. A few follow up questions:
|
| 1. What is it about quantum computers that can guarantee
| 100% secure communication channels?
|
| 2. If the communications are 100% secure, why are we
| worried about eavesdropping?
|
| 3. If it can detect eavesdropping, why do we need to
| concern ourselves with the information they might see/hear?
| Just respond to the detection.
|
| 4. What is it about quantum computing that would make an
| eavesdroppers' overheard information useless to them,
| without also obviating said information to the intended
| recipients?
|
| This is where the language used to discuss this topic turns
| into word salad for me. None of the things you said
| necessarily follow from the things that were said before
| them, but rather just levied as accepted fact.
| foota wrote:
| Sorry, but I think the way you're phrasing this implies a
| burden on them to explain well understood and widely
| accepted principles of quantum physics that you seem to
| be implying are pseudoscience.
|
| This seems like a decent overview if you want to learn
| more: https://www.chalmers.se/en/centres/wacqt/discover-
| quantum-te....
| SAI_Peregrinus wrote:
| 1. Nothing. Quantum Key Distribution is what they're
| talking about, and it still requires P!=NP because
| there's a classical cryptographic step involved (several,
| actually). It just allows you to exchange symmetric keys
| with a party you've used classical cryptography to
| authenticate, it's vulnerable to MITM attacks otherwise.
| So you're dependent on classical signatures and PKI to
| authenticate the endpoints. And you're exchanging
| classical symmetric keys, so still dependent on the
| security of classical encryption like AES-GCM.
|
| 2. Because they're not 100% secure. Only the key exchange
| step with an authenticated endpoint is 100% secure.
|
| 3. Eavesdropping acts like a denial of service and breaks
| all communications on the channel.
|
| 4. It makes the information useless to _everyone_ , both
| the eavesdropper and the recipients. Attempting to
| eavesdrop on a QKD channel randomizes the transmitted
| data. It's a DOS attack. The easier DOS attack is to
| break the fiber-optic cable transmitting the light
| pulses, since every endpoint needs a dedicated fiber to
| connect to every other endpoint.
| staunton wrote:
| > Only the key exchange step with an authenticated
| endpoint is 100% secure.
|
| It's 100% secure _in theory_ , assuming a model of the
| hardware (which is impossible to verify even if you could
| build it to "perfectly" satisfy all model assumptions,
| which of course you also can't).
| thesz wrote:
| What is the difference between channel error or distortion
| and eavesdropping?
| staunton wrote:
| For eavesdropping, there is someone there who cares about
| what you're sending and is successfully learning things
| about it.
| sharpshadow wrote:
| It's not only big tech. Since months I'm reading about joint
| venture types between companies of European countries with
| state sponsoring in QC. When you follow the path there are a
| bundle of fresh created companies in every country each
| claiming a branch like quantum communication, quantum
| encryption, quantum this.. all working together and
| cooperating with the same companies in other EU countries.
|
| Still trying to figure out what is going on. Are they
| preposition for the upcoming breakthroughs and until then it
| will be like the beginning in AI where many claimed to have
| it but actually just pretended. Additionally they likely want
| to access the money flow.
| no_wizard wrote:
| >Isaac Newton was in on the alchemist bandwagon
|
| An often overlooked or unmentioned fact too!
|
| I think its a shame, because it humanizes the (for lack of a
| better term) smartest people in history to know these things
| about them.
|
| Yes, Newton invented calculus, but he also tried to turn lead
| into gold!
|
| So you too, might be able to do something novel, is the idea.
| 77pt77 wrote:
| > I very much quantum today as smoke and mirrors
|
| The most accurate and expirimentaly tested theory of reality is
| "smoke and mirrors".
|
| There are so many other areas to say that about, even in
| physics. But this?...
| tokai wrote:
| With the context of the article its clear that GP means
| quantum computing.
| gaze wrote:
| Pessimistically I think it's most comparable to fusion.
| Theoretically possible but very difficult. I'm biased because
| I'm in the industry, but nothing has cropped up that I've seen
| that requires a miracle.
| naasking wrote:
| > I'm biased because I'm in the industry, but nothing has
| cropped up that I've seen that requires a miracle.
|
| Scaling is itself the open question. Gravitational effects
| start creeping in when you scale up sensitive entangled
| systems and we don't have a good understanding of how gravity
| interacts with entanglement. Entangled systems above a
| certain size may just be impossible.
| shrubble wrote:
| The difference is that whenever it's daytime and there aren't
| many clouds in the sky, you can see an example of fusion
| working at scale...
| krastanov wrote:
| And every time you use a transistor, observe a green plant
| living, or see that your hand does not pass through the
| table when you tap it, you see quantum mechanical effects
| working at scale. Every time you use a telescope, you see
| quantum information processing (interference) at scale. The
| control over that process is the difficult part, same as
| with fusion.
| walleeee wrote:
| Transistors, plants, hands, and tables are all
| macroscopic. We see quantum mechanical effects, but we do
| not see stable superpositions. None of these real-world
| examples seem to shield a quantum state from decoherence
| in the way a quantum computer needs to. The sun
| demonstrates clearly that fusion is controllable (albeit
| in a regime we struggle to match). I don't think your
| examples show that a quantum state can be controlled at
| the scale we need it to be, and I don't know of any
| extant phenomena that do. But I am no expert, yell at me
| if I'm wrong.
| krastanov wrote:
| On the contrary, we have plenty of examples of long-lived
| (many hours, days, or more) examples of superposition in
| many solid state materials and chemical systems. For a
| quantum computer you need both (1) something that can
| retain superposition and (2) be easily controllable.
| Point 2 is the difficult one, because if you can control
| it (interact with it), the "environment" can interact
| with it and destroy it as well.
|
| All of the examples of macroscopic effects above are
| possible thanks to effects explainable only through the
| existence of superposition. It is just that they are not
| particularly controllable and thus not of interest for
| storing quantum information.
|
| Another fun point: the example you are focusing on,
| fusion happening in the sun, is only possible due to the
| quantum tunneling effect, which is itself dependent on
| "superposition" being a real thing. Looking past the
| clouds at our star is already an example of quantum
| mechanics working, which is very much an experimental
| observation of an effect possible only thanks to the
| existence of superposition.
| _heimdall wrote:
| Quantum state _is_ the miracle in my opinion. By definition
| it can never really be confirmed.
|
| You cannot observe the initial state because that collapses
| the super position. Said more simply, we can only see the end
| result and make educated guesses as to how it happened and
| what the state was prior to the experiment.
| tjpnz wrote:
| Quantum annealers have been working on real world problems for
| a while now - assuming they can be expressed as combinatorial
| optimization problems of course.
| krastanov wrote:
| But there is no scalable computational advantage with quantum
| annealers. They are not what most people in the field would
| call a "(scalable/digital) quantum computer".
| hnthrow90348765 wrote:
| D-Wave venturing into blockchain stuff raised a red flag for me
| as a layman investor: https://ir.dwavesys.com/news/news-
| details/2025/D-Wave-Introd...
|
| There are maybe other reasons to invest, but this caused me to
| sell my shares
| EvgeniyZh wrote:
| > won't be the last time we hear about quantum research that
| has been foundational to a lot of work
|
| This research wasn't foundational to a lot of work. Most of
| important/foundational works in quantum (doesn't matter if
| computing or general, I'm not sure which one you meant) are
| verified. How can you possibly base your experimental work on
| someone else's work if you can't replicate it?
| _heimdall wrote:
| Scientific research today is largely about publishing
| positive results, we rarely see negative results published
| and most people focus on publish novel work rather than
| attempting to validate someone else's work.
|
| I agree with you, its a terrible idea to base your work on
| someone else's when it hasn't been well confirmed in
| independent research.
|
| I consider the source work in the OP as foundational because
| Microsoft built so much work and spent so many resources
| building on top of it. It's not foundational to the entire
| field but it _is_ foundational to a lot of follow-up
| research.
| EvgeniyZh wrote:
| > I agree with you, its a terrible idea to base your work
| on someone else's when it hasn't been well confirmed in
| independent research.
|
| It's not about whether it's good or bad idea. To make
| follow-up experiments you need to first reproduce the
| original experiment. That's why faking "big" experiments
| like Schon could never work.
|
| > Microsoft built so much work and spent so many resources
| building on top of it. It's not foundational to the entire
| field but it is foundational to a lot of follow-up
| research.
|
| Will all due respect, a single group (even large one) doing
| a single type of experiments (even important and
| complicated one) is not a lot of research. Also, Microsoft
| knew about data manipulation, that why they moved the
| experiments in house. They didn't do experiments under
| assumption that the early Majorana papers are correct, then
| they wouldn't need to develop their own complicated (and
| somewhat controversial) protocol to detect Majoranas. It
| was quite clear for everyone that regardless of data
| manipulation people were too optimistic interpreting
| Majorana signatures in these early papers.
| andrepd wrote:
| Wait just so I'm sure I understand what you're saying: you
| tried to read but don't understand the mathematics, therefore
| it's smoke and mirrors.
| trentnix wrote:
| Looks like the end of the world has been delayed.
| anonym29 wrote:
| Microsoft's finest, ladies and gentlemen.
| sschueller wrote:
| Sadly I have the feeling some people are starting to just "play"
| being scientists/engineers and not actually doing the real work
| anymore.
| 77pt77 wrote:
| MBA science.
|
| Only perception matters?
| nathan_compton wrote:
| "Fake it till you make it" was practically the motto of young
| scientists when I was matriculating. In fairness, I don't
| think they really meant "fake your research" but our entire
| incentive/competition based society encourages positive
| misrepresentation - you can't do science, good or bad, if you
| get competed out of the system entirely.
|
| Guy Debord wrote a book about what he called "The Society of
| the Spectacle," wherein he argues that capitalism, mostly by
| virtue of transforming objects into cash at the point of
| exchange, (that is, a person can take the money and run)
| tends to cause all things to become evacuated, reduced as
| much as possible to their image, rather than their substance.
|
| I believe even GK Chesterton understood this when he said
| that the purpose of a shovel is to dig, not to be sold, but
| that capitalism tends to see everything as something to be
| sold primarily and then as something to be used perhaps
| secondarily.
|
| There is some truth in all this, I think, though obviously
| the actual physical requirements of living and doing things
| place some restrictions on how far we can transform things
| into their images.
| caseyy wrote:
| "Fake it till you make it." has turned into "fake it."
| recently, and it seems to be working disturbingly well in
| society.
| Panoramix wrote:
| Looking at the paper, cherry picking 5 out of 21 devices is in
| itself not a deal breaker IMO, but it's certainly something they
| should have disclosed. I bet this happens all the time with these
| kinds of exotic devices that take almost a year to manufacture
| only for a single misplaced atom to ruin the whole measurement.
|
| Average of positive and negative Vbias data and many other
| manipulations are hard to justify, this reeks of "desperate PhD
| needed to publish at all costs". Yet at the same time I wouldn't
| fully disqualify the findings, but make the conclusion a lot
| weaker "there might be something here".
|
| All in all, it's in Microsoft's interests that the data is not
| cooked. They can only ride on vaporware for so long. Sooner or
| later the truth will come out; and if Microsoft is burning a lot
| of cash to lie to everyone, the only loser will be Microsoft.
| darth_avocado wrote:
| > cherry picking 5 out of 21 devices is in itself not a deal
| breaker IMO
|
| Might as well draw a straight line through a cloud of data
| points that look like a dog
| crote wrote:
| It's a physical device at the bleeding edge of capabilities.
| Defects are pretty much a guarantee, and getting a working
| sample is a numbers game. Is it really _that_ strange to not
| get a 100% yield?
|
| Having 5 working devices out of 21 is normal. The problem is
| that the other 16 weren't mentioned.
| darth_avocado wrote:
| Well you also need to account for what kind of deviation
| are we talking about between the 21. If they selected the 5
| because they were the best, but the others showed results
| that were within say 0-5% of the 5, then sure that is
| acceptable. But if we're talking about flipping a coin 21
| times, seeing heads 16 times and then choosing the 5 tails
| outcomes as the results, then I would say that's pretty
| unacceptable.
| Panoramix wrote:
| Like I said, a single misplaced atom is enough to wreak
| havoc in the behaviour of these things. That's not the
| problem, everyone knows there's a large gap between
| phenomena observed, and making it consistently
| manufacturable with high yield.
| krastanov wrote:
| I do not think this is the right metaphor. Having 5
| devices work out of 21 is actually a better yield than
| what TSMC would get with a brand new process. This is not
| just normal, this is expected. It is all the other
| allegations that make this be a very questionable case.
| nathan_compton wrote:
| > the only loser will be Microsoft.
|
| Not really - that cash could have been allocated to more
| productive work and more honest people.
| absolutelastone wrote:
| It wasn't just that by itself. There was a list of several
| undisclosed data tweaks and manipulations. None were
| particularly fraudulent or anything, but once you have them all
| included in the paper, as the former author was complaining, it
| seems more likely that they just manipulated the theory and
| data as needed to make them match. There's a big difference
| between predicting something and demonstrating it in
| experiment, versus showing your theory can be made to fit some
| data you have been given when you can pick the right
| adjustments and subset of data.
| teekert wrote:
| Sabine was already skeptical in February [0]. Although to be
| fair, she usually is :) But in this field, I think it is
| warranted.
|
| [0]: https://backreaction.blogspot.com/2025/02/microsoft-
| exaggera...
| eqvinox wrote:
| Sabine Hossenfelder has grown a little... controversial...
| lately. You should probably do some googling (or YouTube
| searching, in this case.) It's not entirely clear to me what's
| going on but some of her videos do raise serious question
| marks.
| matkoniecz wrote:
| can you be more specific what you are alleging?
|
| and little controversy is not automatically a problem or
| reason to discount/ignore someone anyway
| HideousKojima wrote:
| There was an email she claimed to have received many years
| ago from another academic essentially saying "you're right
| that a lot of academic research is BS and just a jobs
| program for academics, but you shouldn't point that out
| because it's threatening a lot of people's livelihood."
| Some people are claiming she fabricated this alleged email
| etc., I haven't looked too much into it myself.
| hinkley wrote:
| I end up playing father confessor often enough at work
| that I have had to launder things people have complained
| about.
|
| When you are trying to make the right calls for a team,
| you need to know what the pushback is, but the bullies
| and masochists on the team don't need to know who
| specifically brought forward a complaint as long as the
| leadership accept it as a valid concern.
|
| So if everyone knows I had a private meeting with Mike
| yesterday it's going to be pretty fucking obvious that I
| got this from Mike unless I fib a bit about the details.
|
| Saying a conversation during a visit happened in email
| sounds like about the sort of thing I might lie about
| while not making up the conversation from whole cloth.
|
| Not that Sabine is perfect. I've let the YouTube
| algorithm know I want to see less of her stuff. But just
| because there is no email doesn't mean there was no
| conversation.
| immibis wrote:
| She has a tendency to be wrong on things outside her domain
| of expertise. It's the classic being an expert in one field
| and thinking you're an expert in all of them.
| dimal wrote:
| Please give specific examples. I keep seeing vague
| comments like this about her, but very little in the way
| of specifics. Without specifics, this is just ad hominem
| rumor mongering.
| krastanov wrote:
| Extreme specifics: her comments on work out of MIT on
| Color Center Qubits was basically "finally an example of
| actual progress in quantum computing because of reason A,
| B, C". That statement was in the class of "not even
| wrong" -- it was just complete non sequitur. People
| actually in the fields she comments on frequently laugh
| at her uninformed nonsense. In this particular case, the
| people that did the study she praised were also among the
| ones laughing at her.
| eqvinox wrote:
| No, I'm intentionally not taking a position or alleging
| anything. I'm pointing out the existence of some
| controversy. It's up to you to decide whether you want to
| look into it, and if yes, what sources to prefer.
| antidumbass wrote:
| I've found great success in ignoring, entirely, baseless
| aspersions cast by faceless anon avatars about people in the
| public eye.
| dsabanin wrote:
| Is there something she is not skeptical of or controversial
| about?
| nlitened wrote:
| Einstein equations
| dsabanin wrote:
| Hm, that may be controversial in itself, depending on where
| you stand in the current cosmology.
| hinkley wrote:
| I don't know if she has changed or I have changed but I don't
| enjoy her stuff anymore. Maybe I should watch some of her old
| stuff and figure that out.
| teekert wrote:
| I'm starting to feel the same indeed.
| chermi wrote:
| A broken clock....
| os2warpman wrote:
| As far as I can tell the only thing >25 years of development into
| quantum computing implementations has resulted in is the
| prodigious consumption of helium-3.
|
| At least with fusion we've gotten some cool lasers, magnets, and
| test and measurement gear.
| krastanov wrote:
| You are right about that (well, except all the progress in
| classical complexity theory and algorithms, cosmology,
| condensed matter physics, material science, and sensing, which
| stemmed from this domain).
|
| But, for the little it is worth, it took much longer between
| Babbage conceiving of a classical computer and humanity
| developing the technology to make classical computers reliable.
| Babbage died before it was possible to build the classical
| computers he invented.
| os2warpman wrote:
| If you are going to use Babbage as the start of the clock, we
| must use the mechanical and electromechanical logarithmic and
| analytical engines created in the late 1800s/early 1900s as
| the stop.
|
| We must also use 1980 as the year in which quantum computing
| was "invented".
|
| As far as progress goes, in all of those fields there are
| naught but papers that say "quantum computing would be
| totally rad in these fields" or simulations that are slower
| than classical computers. (by, like, a lot)
| krastanov wrote:
| There has been a programmable electromechanical computer
| build in the late 1800? Not just a simple calculator?
| Please share examples, this sounds awesome.
|
| Yes, late 1980s is when I would say quantum computing was
| conceived.
|
| I gave plenty of examples of positive outcomes thanks to
| quantum information science in my parenthetical. It is much
| more than the overhyped VC-funded vapor.
| Hasz wrote:
| This kind of fundamental research though is absolutely worth
| it. For a fairly small amount of money (on the nation-state
| scale) you can literally change the world order. Same deal with
| fusion or other long-term research programs.
|
| Quantum computers are still in a hype bubble right now, but
| having a "real" functional one (nothing right now is close IMO)
| is a big a shift as nuclear energy or the transistor.
|
| Even if we don't get a direct result, ancillary research
| products can still be useful, as you mentioned with fusion.
| chermi wrote:
| Based on the comments in this thread... Guys, Microsoft fuckery
| doesn't invalidate an entire field.
|
| I think certain VCs are a little too optimistic about quantum
| computing timelines, but that doesn't mean it's not steadily
| progressing. I saw a comment talking about prime factorization
| from 2001 with some claim that people haven't been working on
| pure quantum computing since then?
|
| It's really hard. It's still firmly academic, with the peculiar
| factor that much of it is industry backed. Google quantum was a
| UCSB research lab turned into a Google branch, while still being
| powered by grad students. You can begin to see how there's going
| to be some culture clash and unfortunate pressure to make claims
| and take research paths atypical of academia (not excusing any
| fraud, edit: also to be very clear, not accusing Google quantum
| of anything). It's a hard problem in a funky environment.
|
| 1) it's a really hard problem. Anything truly quantum is hard to
| deal with, especially if you require long coherence times.
| Consider the entire field of condensed matter (+ some amo). Many
| of the experiments to measure special quantum properties/confirm
| theories do so in a destructive manner - I'm not talking only
| about the quantum measurement problem, I'm talking about the
| probes themselves physically altering the system such that you
| can only get one or maybe a few good measurements before the
| sample is useless. In quantum computing, things need to be cold,
| isolated, yet still read/write accessible over many many cycles
| in order to be useful.
|
| 2) given the difficulty, there's been many proposals for how to
| meet the "practical quantum computer" requirement. This ranges
| from giving up on a true general purpose quantum computer
| (quantum annealers) to NV vacancies, neutral/ionic lattices,
| squid/Josephson based,photonic, hybrid system with mechanical
| resonators, and yeah, topological/anyon shit.
|
| 3) It's hard to predict what will actually work, so every
| approach is a gamble and different groups take different gambles.
| Some take bigger gambles than the others. Id say topological
| quantum was a pretty damn big gamble given how new the theory
| was.
|
| 4) Then you need to gradually build up the actually system +
| infrastructure, validating each subsystem then subsystem
| interactions and finally full systems. Think system preparation,
| system readout, system manipulation, isolation, gate design...
| Each piece of this could be multiple +/- physicist, ece/cse, me,
| CS PhDs + postdocs amount of work. This is deep expertise and
| specialization.
|
| 4) Then if one approach seems to work, however poorly*, you need
| to improve it, scale it. Scaling is not guaranteed. This will
| mean many more PhDs worth trying to improve subsystems.
|
| 5) again, this is really hard. Truly, purely quantum systems are
| very difficult to work with. Classical computing is built on
| transistors, which operate just fine at room temperature*
| _(plenty of noise, no need for cold isolation) with macroscopic
| classical observables /manipulations like current, voltage. Yes,
| transistors work because of quantum effects, and with more recent
| transistors more directly use quantum effects (tunneling). For
| example, the "atomic" units of memory are still effectively
| macroscopic. The systems as a whole are very well described
| classically, with only practical engineering concerns related to
| putting things too close together, impurities, heat dissipation.
| Not to say that any of that is easy at all, but there's no
| question of principle like "will this even work?"
|
| * With a bunch of people on HN shitting on how poorly + a bunch
| of other people saying its a full blown quantum computer +
| probably higher ups trying to make you say it is a real quantum
| computer or something about quantum supremacy.
|
| *_Even in this classical regime think how much effort went into
| redundancy and encoding/decoding schemes to deal with the very
| rare bit flips. Now think of what's needed to build a functioning
| quantum computer at similar scale
|
| No, I don't work in quantum computing, don't invest in it, have
| no stake in it.
| wordpad wrote:
| Why couldn't single-user quantum computers be a viable path?
|
| General computing is great, but we built large hadron collider
| to validate a few specific physics theories, couldn't we we
| make do with single-use quantum computer for important
| problems? Prove out some physics simulation, or to break some
| military encryption or something?
| chermi wrote:
| Oh sure, I'm all for that in the mean time. But the people
| funding this are looking for big payoff. I want to be clear
| that this is not my field and I'm probably a bit behind on
| the latest, especially on the algorithmic side.
|
| IIRC some of them have done proof of principle solutions to
| hydrogen atom ground state, for example. I haven't kept up
| but I'm guessing they've solved more complicated systems by
| now. I don't know if they've gone beyond ground states.
|
| Taking this particular problem as an example... The
| challenge, in my mind, is that we already have pretty good
| classical approaches the problem. Say the limit of current
| approaches is characterized by something like the number of
| electrons ( I don't know actual scaling factors) and that
| number is N_C(lassical). I think the complexity and thus
| required advances (difficulty) for building special purpose
| hypothetical quantum ground state solver that can solve the
| problem for N_Q >> N_C is similar enough to the difficulty
| required to scale a more general quantum computer to some
| "problem" size of moderately smaller magnitude that it's
| probably hard to justify the funding for the special purpose
| one over the generic one.
|
| I could be way off, and it's very possible there's new
| algorithms to solve specific problems that I'm unaware of.
| Such algorithms with an accompanying special purpose quantum
| computer could make its construction investible in the sense
| that efficient solutions to problem under consideration are
| worth enough to offset the cost. Sorry that was very
| convoluted phrasing but I'm on my phone and I gtg.
| devwastaken wrote:
| intellectual property is the entire point of modern tech. it
| doesnt matter if it doesnt work. they want the IP and sit on it.
| that way if someone else actually does the work they can claim
| they own it.
|
| repeal IP laws and regulate tech.
| m101 wrote:
| I bet you quantum computing will go the way of Newtonian physics
| - wrong and only proven so by our ability to measure things.
|
| It's as if Newton insisted that he was right despite the orbit of
| mercury being weird, and blaming his telescope.
|
| Physics is just a description of reality. If your business
| depends on reality being _the same_ as the model, then you 're
| going to have an expensive time.
| thrance wrote:
| Uuh no? Quantum computing relies on some aspects of quantum
| physics, that at this point, have been thoroughly and
| extensively experimentally verified.
|
| If there are objections to quantum computing, and I believe
| there are many, those are to be found in questioning the
| capability of current engineering to build a quantum computer,
| or the usefulness of one if it could be built.
| m101 wrote:
| As the old saying goes: the proof is in the pudding. And
| quantum computing has produced zero pudding. All hype, and
| zero pudding. When they actually do something useful (like
| the equivalent of general relativity and solving GPS), then
| we can see it as a _useful_ theory.
| staunton wrote:
| We still use Newton's equations for building rockets (and a
| _lot_ of other things). A theory being replaced by a better one
| does not mean devices motivated by the obsoleted theory stop
| working...
| m101 wrote:
| We use general relativity for anything fast moving I think.
| Not sure, but pretty sure. GPS wouldn't work with newton. But
| that's the point, newton mostly works _to within an error of
| measurement_
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2025-05-09 23:01 UTC)