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Sigma_Atheist t1_je2n0zv wrote

Amazing. In the very first sentences, you can tell that the author knows nothing about quantum computing:

"Recently, IBM and the Cleveland Clinic unveiled a quantum computer that could advance medical innovation like never before. The IBM Quantum System One was created to crunch large amounts of data at high speeds."

Senseless hype.

Edit: They didn't even report on the qubit count!

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Sigma_Atheist t1_je2ovd7 wrote

Replying to Paraphrand (#2,432,223)

I doubt ChatGPT would think quantum computers can be used to "crunch large amounts of data at high speeds," unlike your average person who hears "quantum computer" and immediately thinks the thing has an unfathomable clock speed without bothering to fact check. Shame on this journalist.

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mescalelf t1_je30cw9 wrote

Replying to Sigma_Atheist (#2,434,447)

Yep, it’s a joke; no way it’s gonna do anything useful except act as a training platform that could be just as easily simulated with digital simulation, as you point out.

They’d be better off applying machine learning (in the vein of AlphaFold 2, for instance) on a digital computer for serious R&D.

Well, unless they’ve made one hell of a breakthrough regarding coherence time. Even then, 20 qubits isn’t exactly a lot to work with.

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Sigma_Atheist t1_je33157 wrote

Replying to TopicRepulsive7936 (#2,434,745)

Because the reporting is misrepresenting quantum computers by making them out to be some supercomputer, when in actuality it is nothing of the sort and there's already enough misinformation disguised as science journalism around quantum computing as it is. It makes me mad.

Further, what actual thing? Nothing in the article tells you the qubit count or any other relevant stat. Another user pointed out that it probably has 20 qubits though, which is completely useless since 20 qubits can be fully simulated on normal computers.

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mescalelf t1_je3htdl wrote

Replying to Nanaki_TV (#2,436,959)

Not quite the right nomenclature (wording), but wording is often less important than content—and on the content of your question, you’re right.

Unlike digital computers, quantum computers don’t reliably output the right answer—even when they work as well as (we think) they possibly could. Instead, they give a distribution (over multiple runs) of correct and incorrect outputs. , These average out to the right answer if the computation is repeated some number of times.

However, quantum computers produce incorrect outputs much more frequently if a quantum computation is interrupted by some interaction—e.g. a thermal photon. It doesn’t take very much interaction to cause “decoherence”, so many types of quantum computer (including the most popular) have to be cooled to extremely low temperatures. There’s also active research on computational ways of improving fault-tolerance/error-tolerance
unfortunately, even with such methods, thousands of qubits are required to do useful computations. Even with aggressive cooling, none of our quantum computers have been able to hit the necessary qubit counts yet.

Quantum computers aren’t really very impressive or useful with low numbers of qubits. The computational power of digital computers scales roughly linearly with respect to the number of computational transistors. The representational complexity of a quantum computer doubles each time a qubit is added; this doesn’t translate nicely to equivalent computational power, but quantum computers do still have much steeper (exponential) scaling for some types of computational problem. Unfortunately, systems of many entangled qubits are much less stable than smaller entangled systems
so we can’t make good use of quantum computers until we can improve coherence time and/or fault tolerance a good deal.

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Ribak145 t1_je3y38i wrote

I dont trust anything IBM says nowadays and until they deliver prove for real quantum computing, this is meaningless

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