Re:IBM unveils 127-qubit quantum processor
by bnjemian on Tuesday November 16, 2021 @07:06PM
(#29247904)
I mean, maybe in the theoretical sense, but do conventional computers barely work in practice? Seems a bit of a pedantic argument.
Gil Kalai and others with similar arguments play an important role in the QC community. They keep the rest of us honest and help point out the gaps. But I do think the ground they have to stand on is shrinking, and fast. Ultimately, they might still be right – that much is certain – but it seems to me that the strides being made in error correction, qubit design, qubit control, hardware architecture, and software are now pushing the field into an exponential scaling regime.
To me, the big question is much less whether we'll get there, and much more "what will they be good for?"
The accomplishment is more akin to creating a bathtub with 127 atoms and doing fluid dynamic simulations on that, which is a much harder problem in many ways than doing the 6e25 version of the experiment. But it is very questionable to me whether any claims of quantum supremacy retain validity when leaving the NISQ domain and trying to do useful computations.
Gil Kalai's work in the area [1] continues to be very influential to me, especially what I consider the most interesting observations, namely that classical computers only barely work -- we rely on the use of long settlement times to avoid Buridan's Principle [2], and without that even conventional computers are too noisy to do actual computation.
[1] https://gilkalai.wordpress.com/2021/11/04/face-to-face-talks... is a recent one
[2] https://lamport.azurewebsites.net/pubs/buridan.pdf