Quantinuum H-Series quantum computer

https://www.quantinuum.com/news/quantinuum-h-series-quantum-computer-accelerates-through-3-more-performance-records-for-quantum-volume-217-218-and-219

by StackOverlord • 3 years ago

24 60 3 years ago

quantinuum.com

dmm• 3 years ago

Our quantum volume data is taken on our commercial systems interwoven with customer jobs.

Are there use-cases for QC other than ruining asymmetrical encryption?

fastneutron6• 3 years ago

Anything involving simulation of quantum mechanical systems. Think materials, molecules, nuclei, general field theories, etc.

The fixation on asymmetric encryption vulnerability is overblown at this point. The near-completion of the post-quantum cryptographic standards and the still long road to fault tolerance make this essentially a non-issue to anyone that hasn’t been living under a rock for the past 20 years.

tjoff• 3 years ago

People encrypting stuff 10 years ago did so under the impression that it would be safe far longer.

People encrypting stuff today might not have an option to make it resilient.

How is that not a problem?

detourdog6• 3 years ago

Are you saying they are primarily a research tool?

rbanffy• 3 years ago

Even if the QV benchmark isnt great, 1000x the next best result is something.

dilawar• 3 years ago

I actually dont understand most of quantum stuff. When they say 16 qbits, are these simulated qbits or real?

Aren't real qbits impossible to make currently because of noise problem? When I was doing my masters, people were talking about replacing heavily doped channel of silicon transister with carbon nanotube. Turns out the hardest problem was making a decent connection between nanotube and metal. I dont think the problem has been solved yet.

I am guessing that well see a functional carbon nanotubes in silicon transistor at least a decade before we see real qbits? After all fabrication processes must be similar at this scale.

lucubratory• 3 years ago

There are real qubits, that suffer from all the reliability issues implied by what you're talking about. There are also error correction algorithms to try and salvage from the mess the computational equivalent of error-free real qubits, through error correction on a bunch of real-world, error-prone qubits. The industry standard (such as it is) when reporting qubit counts is that you report your qubit logical equivalent, because that's what counts for computation. If your chip has 500 qubits with a ruinous error rate that requires a god-tier error correction algorithm to achieve a functional result equivalent to a 12 qubit computer, you should report that as "We made a 12 qubit computer".

fastneutron6• 3 years ago

A qubit is any addressable 2-level quantum system. Think spins, oscillation modes, energy levels, polarization, etc. All of these have been implemented and demonstrated to varying degrees, with superconductors and trapped ions (this article) being the farthest along.

Noise is indeed a problem, and right now these systems can’t execute more than a few hundred operations at most before decohering to the point of randomness. There is an error rate threshold (~1e-3 - 1e-4) at which error correction becomes possible, and the field has been hovering around that threshold for the past 3 years or so. I think we’ll know within the next 5 years whether or not it’s possible to engineer these error correction schemes in a scalable way.

Mistletoe• 3 years ago

I’m seeing a lot of quantum computing stuff everywhere (here, investing subreddits) now. It feels strongly like firms are trying to profit from AI hype 2.0, but make it quantum.

detourdog6• 3 years ago

That is the cycle.

From a big picture it is starting to make sense. VCs throw large sums at a problem. Find out the hard problems and move on to other low hangin fruit until they hit a wall.

Financial failure maybe the result but human progress moves on.

Outside the hype-cycle is long term development feeding off any advancement that can be applied.

nonameiguess• 3 years ago

They kind of say this, but we really need better quantum benchmarks. How does something like quantum volume analogize to address space or FLOPs or something somewhat intelligle in classical computing? What were the space and cost requirements to achieve this growth? I was under the impression years back that a major obstacle to quantum computing was keeping qubits from decohering required immense space and extreme cooling compared to classical computers. How has qubit density per dollar spent on the computer changed over this same span of time? Did the technology actually get better or did they just throw more money at it?

gaze• 3 years ago

Without error correction, these benchmarks are going to be a bit weird and fluffy. It’s a bit like racing a half-built car. There’s the other bit of complexity that the connectivity matters a great deal. Supercomputers can be connected on a grid, torus, fat tree, etc. and the different connectivity will lend to different problem solving capabilities in a somewhat subtle way. Hence different benchmarks highlight different capabilities, and correspondingly, each company will push a benchmark that makes their machine look the best.

dave3332• 3 years ago

What real problems have quantum computers solved? I would assume they can solve suitably trivial examples with their limited capability in a way that is demonstrably superior to traditional computing.

hannob• 3 years ago

None. We're in the stage of early research, still trying to figure out how practical it is to build useful QCs at all. Anyone claiming otherwise is trying to fool people.

Maybe QCs will have useful applications in the future. Maybe not. If so, then it's decades away.

sghiassy• 3 years ago

When Voltaire was experimenting with electricity, no one could ever imagine what electricity was good for

jjgreen3• 3 years ago

... and when Becher was experimenting with phlogiston, no-one knew where that would lead.

dave3332• 3 years ago

Interesting that electricity has been useful in bringing about things Voltaire championed such as freedom of speech, and abolition of (slave) labor. However I think you meant Volta the inventor of the battery. Also QC seems to suffer from the opposite of lack of imagination about what it might be good for.

riffraff• 3 years ago

Voltaire

I suspect you mean Volta[0], tho I did wonder if Voltaire[1] worked with electricity :)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alessandro_Volta

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voltaire

jairuhme• 3 years ago

I sat in on a seminar with the Cleveland Clinic and IBM as they have a partnership around quantum, and one of the big problems they were working on was using it to speed up drug discovery. I don't recall if they have solved problems completely yet, but it has sped up the discovery process by orders of magnitude.

mechagodzilla• 3 years ago

Nothing involving quantum computing has sped up the 'drug discovery' process by orders of magnitude. At best it has 'accelerated' some toy QM problem that is likely a dozen steps removed from anything you could call drug discovery. I'd love to be proven wrong, but I've yet to see any non-trivial computational chemistry work done on quantum computers.

hackandthink• 3 years ago

21 was factored into 3 and 7

You have to start somewhere.

deng3• 3 years ago

Please also note that they did not run Shor's algorithm to compute this. They had to greatly simplify the algorithm, so that it works specifically for the number '21'.

StackOverlord3• 3 years ago

Quantinuum is already tackling NLP question-answering tasks, it runs on quantum hardware. The quantum categorial crowd is adamant they'll surpass ChatGPT (the big promise iirc is that it will scale linearly with context length, GPT scales quadratically). For instance see this tweet by Quantinuum head of research and this burgeoning field's main rock:

https://twitter.com/coecke/status/1655695990739927040?s=20

Coecke went from supervising dozen of thesis at Oxford Quantum (logic) Group to preparing summer camps for high school pupils this year. It's also taking off socially/academically, and observing the field evolving we might have a quantum equivalent of ChatGPT before or at the same time we get implementations of Shor's algorithm (source: my own intuition).

See this for instance: https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.11523

cgranade3• 3 years ago

The problem you'll run into for any application of quantum computing to large language models is that quantum computers just aren't very good at big data applications. There's two reasons for that:

- Current devices, as well as devices likely to be built in the near- to medium-term are quite limited in the number of qubits that they implement. The current record for the most fault-tolerant qubits in a single device is 1. That's a hell of a lot better than where the field was at a couple years ago, but it's far from the huge amount of data that needs to be processed for LLM training and evaluation.

- Even if you have enough qubits to store training data, looking them up on a quantum device is still challenging due to what's sometimes called the qRAM problem. It's not trivial to make a quantum oracle that returns the data stored at a given index, and it's still an area of ongoing research to figure out how to do that.

That's part of why you see quantum algorithms being developed less for big data tasks and more for big compute tasks like chemistry. There, the program might be very large, but size of the input that has to be stored within the quantum devices and the size of the output you measure back out are both quite small, even down to a single floating-point number in some cases.

(source: I've worked in quantum computing for about twenty years now.)

seydor• 3 years ago

i classify QC in the same shelf as cryptocurrency. Solutions asking for problems that are somehow persistently overvalued.

jdjdjdhhd• 3 years ago

They are overvalued until you understand how to use them

detourdog6• 3 years ago

Are these systems delicate? Is this a higher form of "solid state device" Are they simple to manufacture.

I'm curious about them but I'm skeptical on their usefulness compared to existing things that can actual be observed with the naked eye. I'm a big fan of trouble shooting with an ohm meter and I could apply the same to a techniques to a visible light optical circuit.

What tools are used to trouble shoots a qubit?

Our_Benefactors2• 3 years ago

“There are lots of great crypto projects, just look for the builders!”

Sorry, I’m not convinced. Over a decade of media puffery about how quantum computing will break encryption and nothing to indicate this is actually a claim based in reality.

m3kw92• 3 years ago

There are uses cases for both but the hype is where crypto is orders of magnitude ahead of QC

cubefox• 3 years ago

So IBM introduced a quantum computer capability measure (Quantum Volume) which is more meaningful than counting qubits that aren't comparable. But now this post sounds suspiciously like this company is goodharting[1] the new measure. They mention that there are criticisms of Quantum Volume, but they don't show their results for any other benchmark. I imagine it is way easier to goodhart a single benchmark than several.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

deng3• 3 years ago

Yes, here's Scott Aaronson's opinion on that measure: https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=4649

TL;DR: Instead of using a single measure, just give all the details on the machine as clear as possible:

How many qubits do you have? With what coherence times? With what connectivity? What are the 1- and 2-qubit gate fidelities? What depth of circuit can you do? What resources do the standard classical algorithms need to simulate your system? Most importantly: what’s the main drawback of your system, the spec that’s the worst, the one you most need to improve? What prevents you from having a scalable quantum computer right now? And are you going to tell me, or will you make me scour Appendix III.B in your paper, or worse yet, ask one of your competitors?

houseatrielah• 3 years ago

These circuits have a width, meaning how many qubits are involved, and a depth, meaning the number of discrete time steps during which the circuit can run gates before the qubits decohere... The Quantum Volume protocol identifies the largest square-shaped circuit — one where the width and depth are equal

https://medium.com/qiskit/what-is-quantum-volume-anyway-a4df...

Current state of the art is 20-qbits somehow equals a quantum volume of 2^19, which I don't get since 20^2 = 400.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_volume

konradha• 3 years ago

Disentangling hype from practicality: https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.00523

stodor89• 3 years ago

I love that OP changed the title to comply with the Betteridge's Law of Headlines.

m3kw92• 3 years ago

Yeah it’s not taking off till it reaches mass business use cases, right now is still for very micro niche use cases. It can’t beat classical computer for most practical cases

swalsh• 3 years ago

I guess we'll know quantum computers have reached critical mass when Satoshis bitcoin stash mysteriously transfers to a new account.

bsuvc2• 3 years ago

It's a little sad to see the amount of cynicism and negativity here around quantum computing.

It's so early. To compare this to traditional computers, we are basically in the stage of a mainframe taking up an entire room. Where they are a novelty, not something every business has yet.

I'm sure there was a lot of skepticism from so-called "smart people" back then too.

Sure, maybe some PR people have over-hyped quantum computing for publicity, but that doesn't say anything about the future if the technology itself.

deng3• 3 years ago

I'm pretty sure quantum computing is not seen negatively around here. In fact, articles on Scott Aaronson's blog for instance turn up regularly. What is seen negatively for sure is the hype train, to which this article clearly belongs, as it is basically a press release for Quantinuum. I mean, on the one hand, I'm happy that people have figured out how to get VC money for fundamental quantum research. However, I think in the end, this kind of hype will do more harm than good for the field. The hype train will eventually crash, and researchers will go elsewhere (see also: neural networks in the AI winter).

bsuvc2• 3 years ago

Yeah, you're probably right. I guess maybe I read the mood wrong on this.

fastneutron6• 3 years ago

Depends on the time of day. Sometimes quantum topics generate good discussion here, and other times it’s a peanut gallery of minimally-informed dismissals. I’ve had a heck of a time trying to find a decent online community to discuss this stuff in a properly nuanced way.

dang• 3 years ago

The submitted title ("Is Quantum Computing taking off?") broke the site guidelines, which ask:

"Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Titles are by far the biggest influence on comments so this rule is an important one! In this case the generic title led to a generic thread, which is not what we want here. I've changed it now.

Quantinuum H-Series quantum computer

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