from Hacker News

Google plans to reach a Quantum Computing milestone before the year is out

by recurser on 4/22/17, 11:18 AM with 49 comments

  • by mark_l_watson on 4/22/17, 12:30 PM

    I was excited to read this article up to the last sentence, a quote from the program manager “We’re trying to get support within Google, and this experiment has been very good to get other engineers talking to us.” to me, this statement negates much of the positive spin of the article. That said, the title does say 'stepping stone.'

    My primary professional interest is AI and quantum computing to pushing the field forward seems almost inevitable.

  • by jboggan on 4/22/17, 6:39 PM

    I'm happy that this project is coming along. I never had any contact with the physical/chip team but I did attempt to contribute something to the theory group in a 20% project. It was absolutely the best and most challenging work I had during my stint at Google, and I can definitely say the quantum theory group were the brightest minds I met there.

    I think they could be on to something with their approaches, both physical and theoretical. I could definitely see a QPU in a few years serving a role in Google Cloud for specific computations. But I don't think that the groups are currently getting the headcount and engineering power that they need, I think the worst bottleneck I saw on the theoretical side was a lack of fulltime engineers to test and implement the researcher's awesome ideas. I'm hoping that gets more attention and resources, because I think Google might actually be sitting on another goldmine here.

  • by johncolanduoni on 4/22/17, 2:50 PM

    If you want to read the paper laying out the plan the article is referring to, it's here: https://arxiv.org/abs/1608.00263

  • by smichel17 on 4/22/17, 2:28 PM

    When "reach a milestone in computing history" is written 4 times before getting to the content (hn title, article title, article summary, first sentence of article), the article feels a lot like click bait, which really discourages me from wanting to give it any of my time. Anyone want to write a tldr?

  • by mck- on 4/22/17, 3:43 PM

    I'm surprised there is no mention of D-Wave systems - the quantum computer that Google bought a while ago [1] and how/why they decided to build it themselves from scratch.

    [1] https://www.quora.com/How-much-did-Google-pay-for-the-quantu...

  • by frik on 4/22/17, 2:56 PM

    Wake me up when it's ready. For two decades we hear announcements that Quantum Computers are almost ready.

    Yet beside bluffs and prototypes that require superconductor with very cold -230° C to do little, none of them resurfaced later.

    Quantum Computers can be exiting and devastating. What happens if the first company/state keeps it a trade secrete and uses Quantum Computers without telling the rest of the world? (what if...) With Quantum Computers all the "secure digital stuff" of today can be broken, say good bye to your cloud online security. A good/bad actor can read everything. We should think about how to mitigate this issue, isn't it?

  • by skdotdan on 4/22/17, 1:33 PM

    Are quantum chips supposed to replace the current CPUs and GPUs? Or are they supposed to be "just" another component that we connect to the CPU, the same way we connect GPUs?

  • by apexalpha on 4/22/17, 2:06 PM

    Ah, now I can finally digitally simultaneously love and hate Google.

  • by indolering on 4/22/17, 12:57 PM

    This is still just an annealer, right? Way cool, just nothing beyond what DWave is offering.

  • by protomyth on 4/22/17, 4:15 PM

    Is there a definitive book explaining Quantum Computing from the ground up?

  • by sanguy on 4/22/17, 7:07 PM

    All wasted on finding the best advert to match to your search terms....

  • by faragon on 4/22/17, 2:46 PM

    I hope that doesn't finish as a "quantum bubble".