Comment by ABS
2 days ago
money quote:
"if Microsoft’s claim stands, then topological qubits have finally reached some sort of parity with where more traditional qubits were 20-30 years ago. I.e., the non-topological approaches like superconducting, trapped-ion, and neutral-atom have an absolutely massive head start: there, Google, IBM, Quantinuum, QuEra, and other companies now routinely do experiments with dozens or even hundreds of entangled qubits, and thousands of two-qubit gates. Topological qubits can win if, and only if, they turn out to be so much more reliable that they leapfrog the earlier approaches—sort of like the transistor did to the vacuum tube and electromechanical relay. Whether that will happen is still an open question, to put it extremely mildly."
The quote that struck me was
> I foresee exciting times ahead, provided we still have a functioning civilization in which to enjoy them.
If you are shocked by this, I suggest not reading his other recent topics.
Spent an hour going through his blog. Wild and unpleasant ride.
6 replies →
> If you are shocked by this, I suggest not reading his other recent topics.
Given that this is Scott Aaronson, does he suggest we'll break cryptography and destroy the foundations of the modern internet?
2 replies →
There seems to be a bit of a disconnect between the first and the second sentence (to my completely uneducated mind).
If topological qubits turn out to be so much more reliable then it doesn't really matter how much time was spent trying to make other types of qubits more reliable. It's not really a head start, is it?
Or are there other problems besides preventing unwanted decoherence that might take that much time to solve?
The point I think is this: if topological qubits are similar to other types of qubits, then investing in them is going to be disappointing because the other approaches have so much more work put into them.
So, he is saying that this approach will only pay off if topological qubits are a fundamentally better approach than the others being tried. If they turn out to be, say, merely twice as good as trapped ion qubits, they'll still only get to the achievements of current trapped ion designs with another, say, 10-15 years of continued investment.
The whole point though is that they are step function better than traditional qubits, in a way that is simply a type error to compare.
The utility of traditional qubits depends entirely on how reliable and long-lived they are, and how to can scale to larger numbers of qubits. These topological qubits are effectively 100% reliable, infinite duration, and scale like semiconductors. According to the marketing literature, at least…
4 replies →
Yeah I mean that's exactly what MS are talking about, only requiring 1/20 of the checksum qubits or something.
https://www.ft.com/content/a60f44f5-81ca-4e66-8193-64c956b09...
what Microsoft claim in their marketing copy reported by the FT - for the average reader - and what a third-party, well-known expert in the field thinks... are on very different levels AFAIC
Microsoft is saying: we did it!
Everyone else is saying: prove it!
Yes, that's why we read decent journalism that includes the opinions of experts. MS are still saying production use is pretty far off.
1 reply →