Quantum Supremacy: How the Quantum Computer Revolution Will Change Everything

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Most of the big breakthroughs so far have been in controlled settings, or using problems that we already know the answer to. In any case, reaching quantum supremacy doesn’t mean quantum computers are actually ready to do anything useful.

And if you think that a positive answer on a numerical experiment can never definitively tell you that this is what is going on in the physics world, then why did the Nobel committee give a prize to the discovery of the Hulse–Taylor pulsar system, where numerical calculations confirmed that it was losing energy because of gravitational waves. (For all we know, there might a different mechanism that just happens to have the same orbital decay parameters.) Update: I’ve now been immersed in the AI safety field for one year, let I wouldn’t consider myself nearly ready to write a book on the subject. My knowledge of related parts of CS, my year studying AI in grad school, and my having created the subject of computational learning theory of quantum states would all be relevant but totally insufficient. And AI safety, for all its importance, has less than quantum computing does in the way of difficult-to-understand concepts and results that basically everyone in the field agrees about. And if I did someday write such a book, I’d be pretty terrified of getting stuff wrong, and would have multiple expert colleagues read drafts. Maybe he should have let ChatGPT write it? Something entirely different, could you comment on this paper, pretty please This pretty conclusively shows that the explanation for the Kaku phenomenon is simply that he has no idea what he is talking about. That mind-blowing future is the focus of the final five or so hours of the audiobook, which explores the real-world impacts quantum computing could have: altering our immune systems to avoid cancer and Alzheimer’s, increasing crop yields, ending world hunger. As Kaku puts it, “the familiar laws of common sense are routinely violated at the atomic level”; but his lucid prose and thought process make abundant sense of this technological turning point.You don’t need numerical calculations for the Hulse-Taylor pulsar, it’s just quadrupole radiation described in textbooks, see e.g. eq. (3) in While we’re on the subject of Stanley Deser, I’ll mention that World Scientific is providing free access to his autobiography, _Forks in the Road_, until July 31 of this year:

An exhilarating guide to the astonishing future of quantum computing, from the international bestselling physicist Well, that’s the universal law of technology, that [it] can be used for good or evil. When humans discovered the bow and arrow, we could use that to bring down game and feed people in our tribe. But of course, the bow and arrow can also be used against our enemies.” When I was a teenager, I enjoyed reading Hyperspace, an early popularization of string theory by the theoretical physicist Michio Kaku. I’m sure I’d have plenty of criticisms if I reread it today, but at the time, I liked it a lot. In the decades since, Kaku has widened his ambit to, well, pretty much everything, regularly churning out popular books with subtitles like “How Science Will Revolutionize the 21st Century” and “How Science Will Shape Human Destiny and Our Daily Lives.” He’s also appeared on countless TV specials, in many cases to argue that UFOs likely contain extraterrestrial visitors. Quantum computing could change the world. It could transform medicine, break encryption and revolutionise communications and artificial intelligence. Companies like IBM, Microsoft and Google are racing to build reliable quantum computers. China has invested billions.I’ve never heard of Kaku, perhaps because the days of roaming through a bookstore looking at the popular science shelves have passed. Based on your review, I strongly suspect that Kaku asked ChatGPT to write it. I am not sure what Feynman thought quantum computers could do, but they gain you no formal power over classical machines: any problem which can be solved with a quantum computer can be solved with a classical computer, and vice versa. What they do gain is an improvement in time complexity for some problems. That in practice makes some problems soluble which would not be soluble on a classical machine because they have some awful time complexity.

Thank you. Physicists are unusually polite group of people. The way you detect someone is not worth listening is the deafening silence around them from their peers. A good advice with cranks, but when money, government or the public is involved, someone should say something. Kaku is just cynically making money.At this stage, it’s worth introducing an important caveat. Quantum computers are very, very hard to make. Because they rely on tiny particles that are extremely sensitive to any kind of disturbance, most can only run at temperatures close to absolute zero, where everything slows down and there’s minimal environmental “noise”. That is, as you would expect, quite difficult to arrange. So far, the most advanced quantum computer in the world, IBM’s Osprey, has 433 qubits. This might not sound like much, but as the company points out “the number of classical bits that would be necessary to represent a state on the Osprey processor far exceeds the total number of atoms in the known universe”. What they don’t say is that it only works for about 70 to 80 millionths of a second before being overwhelmed by noise. Not only that, but the calculations it can make have very limited applications. As Kaku himself notes: “A workable quantum computer that can solve real-world problems is still many years in the future.” Some physicists, such as Mikhail Dyakonov at the University of Montpellier, believe the technical challenges mean the chances of a quantum computer “that could compete with your laptop” ever being built are pretty much zero. I am just reading a book about Ronald Reagan’s “Star Wars” Strategic Defense Initiative program. It is horrifying how far Edward Teller was able to convince the President, Congress, Pentagon and the public into his hare-brained visions ( “Brilliant Pebbles”, “Excalibur”, and so on). Pure monomaniacal intensity can bring in billions. As for his nonsense about quantum computing, there’s so much promotional bullshit going on that it’s understandable that anyone wanting to do something about this has no particular reason to start with Kaku.

Sam Leith ‘Everything is going to be turned upside down’: Michio Kaku on the new world of quantum computing This is justified by a bizarre paragraph about lattice gauge theory, which explains that since we can’t solve QCD analytically, here’s what theorists do: Estimates that I have seen say it’ll require about a million physical qubits for 110 to 150 or so logical qubits, though that depends on error rate and algorithm. I strongly doubt that you can do 7000 logical with only 1 million physical ones, it’s almost certainly considerably more. At the very least I’d like to see a source for the NS estimate. That’s a good question, one I’ve asked people over the years. On the string theory front, Kaku has been writing misleading popular books on the topic for over 35 years. Most string theorists agree, at least privately, that what he writes and says has become increasingly inaccurate and increasingly embarrassing. They generally however make the argument: “dealing with this is not my responsibility, there’s loads of misleading stuff out there about science. And, maybe it will have a positive effect, getting young people and the public interested in this kind of science, going on to read better books.” A cynical point of view on this would be that you can’t expect people to go out of their way to challenge something untrue which is promoting their own interests. When it gets to the point of damaging their interests, they might do something and we’re not there yet.This experiment certainly could possibly give a negative answer to the question: is the BFSS matrix model the same as one formulation of type IIA string theory. Negative answers can be valuable. In any case, for Kaku, knowledge is power. It’s part of the reason he’s moved from the lab to TV, radio and books. “The whole purpose of writing books for the public is so that [they] can make educated, reasonable, wise decisions about the future of technology. Once technology becomes so complicated that the average person cannot grasp it, then there’s big trouble, because then people with no moral compass will be in charge of the direction of that technology.”