The system is clearly not "live and in use" without its dilution fridge and thermal radiation shields.
74 days ago [-]
rezmason 74 days ago [-]
Just as long as we don't observe it reeeeally closely, I imagine.
teleforce 74 days ago [-]
>The computer is (said to be) live and in use by companies, so cryogenic cooling keeps the system temperature as close to absolute zero as possible to conserve that precious quantum state.
Before LLMs/AI became the obvious "next big thing in computing" I remember coming across a fair number of opportunistic devs on LinkedIn trying to promote themselves as "quantum software engineers", and even a just a year or two ago I would see "quantum machine learning" on people's profiles. I remember thinking maybe I had missed something and seeing how many qubits we could even have... needless to say it was (and still is) not enough for any meaningful ML work quite yet.
If you search you can still find some, and, as someone who has spent more than a decade doing actual machine learning, I find the audacity to claim that you're doing any kind of serious software engineering, let along proper ML work, on a quantum computer to be almost impressively audacious.
amitav1 74 days ago [-]
As a fellow currently dipping my toes into quantum machine learning, I think that you think we're saying "machine learning on quantum hardware", when what we actually mean is "machine learning for quantum computing on classical hardware". That is, using machine learning on classical computers to try to increase the effectiveness of quantum hardware.
hulitu 73 days ago [-]
> what we actually mean is "machine learning for quantum computing on classical hardware"
No blockchain ? what happened to blockchain ? /s
volemo 74 days ago [-]
I know a couple of quantum software engineers and these people are in universities writing novel algorithms on whiteboards (and sometimes testing them out in QuPy).
georgeecollins 74 days ago [-]
As I understand it Quantum algorithms are very much needed as the hardware improves. The hardware gets shown off, but there aren't a lot of algorithms that can take advantage of it if it worked better. Yet.
volemo 74 days ago [-]
As I understand it, the hardware very much lags behind the algorithms. We have plenty of cool algorithms to run on quantum computers, but to be practically interesting they all need more qubits or better coherence times than is available today.
hershkumar 71 days ago [-]
The hardware very much lags behind the algorithmic advances, much of the current push for new features in quantum hardware (midcircuit measurement/feedforward, phonon mode coupling, etc) often comes from theorist colleagues pestering experimentalists about whether their hardware can run their algorithms yet.
In fact, this is analogous to the original motivation for the development of classical supercomputers, physicists wanted to run expensive non-perturbation Lattice QCD calculations, so they co-designed some of the earliest supercomputer architectures.
NedF 74 days ago [-]
[dead]
potato3732842 74 days ago [-]
Probably just marketing wank, but I got a chuckle out of "it’s not likely to be something you’ll ever have at home" as if we haven't all heard that before.
TriangleEdge 74 days ago [-]
This seems like a PR stunt to me. Now I am wondering if there was similar news about transistors.
TMWNN 74 days ago [-]
This is consistent with IBM's history of putting computers doing customers' work on display. I am aware of the company doing so in New York and Toronto.
andrewxdiamond 74 days ago [-]
They also have one displayed at the Cleveland Clinic main campus _cafeteria_
Imo focusing in “showing off” instead of “providing value” is a bit of a product-smell. Maybe thats just the point tho, IBM seems to prioritize impressing C-suites over actually accomplishing anything
mikeyouse 74 days ago [-]
It’s not unheard of in the medical realm. Slightly different but when Intuitive Surgical released their DaVinci robotic surgery platforms, a hospital system I worked with was early on their list. They also set up the demo unit in the cafeteria so you could see surgeons peeling oranges and then stitching them back up or what not.
sanswork 74 days ago [-]
Back in the early 2000s I worked for Cap Gemini in Birmingham England which had a part of the office that was some sort of partnership with IBM GS(I think IBM did the hardware and cap got the services contacts). They also had a big blinkin lights server setup in the middle of the office for clients to see. As a teenage geek in his first tech job I used to love going to peek at it even though I did tape rotation on the real servers in the basement most days.
compsciphd 73 days ago [-]
It's also consistent with IBM's history of just putting what they considered important computers from history on display in their offices.
When I post doc'd at TJW I know they had a big museum like display in the lobby (But this was years ago, who knows if its still there), with ibm computers from history, but also things like babbage's and the like.
I suspect I’m not alone in pausing around the statement:
> "It’s not likely to be something you’ll ever have at home"
I’m curious… what would need to be true to make this statement wrong?
fancyfredbot 74 days ago [-]
We'd need to know how to build a useful quantum computer, find a useful algorithm to run on it (factoring large primes lacks broad consumer appeal), and use this demand to fund research into a way to reduce manufacturing and running costs to reasonable levels.
Alternatively we all move in to science labs.
pjs_ 74 days ago [-]
Dil fridge will get a bit hot with its clothes off like that
MengerSponge 74 days ago [-]
Either IBM has cracked optically transparent coatings that cycle from 300 to 1K repeatedly and acrylic that has a metal's thermal conductivity, or it's a sham.
Really hard to tell which it could be.
volemo 74 days ago [-]
> optically transparent coatings that cycle from 300 to 1K repeatedly and acrylic that has a metal's thermal conductivity
I believe that still wouldn’t work because optical part of the spectrum carries thermal energy too.
MengerSponge 74 days ago [-]
Oh hush, you're not going to nerd snipe me into doing the thermal flux calculations today.
Optical photons don't carry an impossible amount of energy: I've seen liquid helium through a small coated window. The window was there for ion beam purposes, not "entertaining the grad student", and it was a big element in the heat budget!
74 days ago [-]
carabiner 74 days ago [-]
This could cause a resonance cascade.
RealInverse42 74 days ago [-]
And can it observe the observers?
t1234s 74 days ago [-]
reminds me of computers in 80's/early 90's scifi movies
MaintenanceMode 74 days ago [-]
Or can you!?
seeknotfind 74 days ago [-]
"It’s not likely to be something you’ll ever have at home" Pessimistic much?
hershkumar 72 days ago [-]
I think the more convincing argument is that most known applications of quantum computers (sidestepping any hardware practicalities), are for niche problems (in my wheelhouse, quantum simulation), the average person has no (practically advantageous) reason to own a quantum computer.
seeknotfind 61 days ago [-]
I suspect that once quantum computers actually scale up so that you can play with them, we'll find all sorts of interesting things to do with them.
However, even now, you can imagine that if quantum computers were small enough, it would be worth it to have it just for the asymptotically fast prime generation with Shor's algorithm. I don't think that's that far fetched. Of course, people wouldn't necessarily need to know they have a quantum computer, but they don't necessarily know the workings of their computers today anyway.
Rendered at 08:57:57 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
But can it factors 21? [1]
[1] Why haven't quantum computers factored 21 yet?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45082587
If you search you can still find some, and, as someone who has spent more than a decade doing actual machine learning, I find the audacity to claim that you're doing any kind of serious software engineering, let along proper ML work, on a quantum computer to be almost impressively audacious.
No blockchain ? what happened to blockchain ? /s
In fact, this is analogous to the original motivation for the development of classical supercomputers, physicists wanted to run expensive non-perturbation Lattice QCD calculations, so they co-designed some of the earliest supercomputer architectures.
Imo focusing in “showing off” instead of “providing value” is a bit of a product-smell. Maybe thats just the point tho, IBM seems to prioritize impressing C-suites over actually accomplishing anything
When I post doc'd at TJW I know they had a big museum like display in the lobby (But this was years ago, who knows if its still there), with ibm computers from history, but also things like babbage's and the like.
Theres even a python package called quisket.
https://quantum.cloud.ibm.com/
> "It’s not likely to be something you’ll ever have at home"
I’m curious… what would need to be true to make this statement wrong?
Alternatively we all move in to science labs.
Really hard to tell which it could be.
I believe that still wouldn’t work because optical part of the spectrum carries thermal energy too.
Optical photons don't carry an impossible amount of energy: I've seen liquid helium through a small coated window. The window was there for ion beam purposes, not "entertaining the grad student", and it was a big element in the heat budget!
However, even now, you can imagine that if quantum computers were small enough, it would be worth it to have it just for the asymptotically fast prime generation with Shor's algorithm. I don't think that's that far fetched. Of course, people wouldn't necessarily need to know they have a quantum computer, but they don't necessarily know the workings of their computers today anyway.