Quantum Supremacy: How the Quantum Computer Revolution Will Change Everything

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You’ll probably never have a quantum chip in your laptop or smartphone. There’s not going to be an iPhone Q. Quantum computers have been theorised about for decades, but the reason it’s taken so long for them to arrive is that they’re incredibly sensitive to interference.

What is quantum computing? How does it work? How will it change the world? Get the WIRED guide now. Honestly, though, the errors aren’t the worst of it. The majority of the book is not even worth hunting for errors in, because fundamentally, it’s filler. If you ask a normal computer to figure its way out of a maze, it will try every single branch in turn, ruling them all out individually until it finds the right one. A quantum computer can go down every path of the maze at once. It can hold uncertainty in its head. on Friday, May 19th, 2023 at 5:15 am and is filed under Quantum, Rage Against Doofosity, Speaking Truth to Parallelism.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. They’re powerful, but not reliable. That means that for now, claims of quantum supremacy have to be taken with a pinch of salt. In October 2019, Google published a paper suggesting it had achieved quantum supremacy – the point at which a quantum computer can outperform a classical computer. But its rivals disputed the claim – IBM said Google had not tapped into the full power of modern supercomputers. Let N represent the number we wish to factorize. For an ordinary digital computer, the amount of time it takes to factorize a number grows exponentially, like t ~ e N, times some unimportant factors. 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. 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.Maybe he should have let ChatGPT write it? Something entirely different, could you comment on this paper, pretty please 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.