this post was submitted on 14 Mar 2025
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Quantum science is not fraudulent, incredible leaps are being made with the immense influx of funding.
Quantum industry is a different beast entirely, with scientific rigour being corrupted by stock price management.
It's an objective fact that quantum computers indeed exist now, but only at a very basic prototype level. Don't trust anything a journalist says about them, but they are real, and they are based on technology we had no idea if would ever be possible.
Well, I love being wrong! Are you able to show a documented quantum experiment that was carried out on a quantum computer (and not an emulator using a traditional architecture)?
How about a use case that isn't simply for breaking encryption, benchmarking, or something deeply theoretical that they have no way to know how to actually program for or use in the real world?
I'm not requesting these proofs to be snarky, but simply because I've never seen anything else beyond what I listed.
When I see all the large corporations mentioning the processing power of these things, they're simply mentioning how many times they can get an emulated tied bit to flip, and then claiming grandiose things for investors. That's pretty much it. To me, that's fraudulent (or borderline) corporate BS.
Use cases are generally problems with very large amount of factors that are not feasible to calculate with normal comouters, think about chemical/medicine simulation and logistics optimization or public transport timetables.
So that's the part that gets me stuck. There is no clear answer and it has no way to check the result as QC aren't capable of doing so (otherwise they wouldn't be using QC since they can only be based on binary inputs and binary guesses of true / false outcomes on a massive scale). How can it decide that it is "correct" and that the task is completed?
Computations based on guesses of true / false can only be so accurate with no way to check the result in the moment.
Yes, took me months to see that too! The point of the chances is though, with some problems you don't need a definitive answer. Having a solution that solves 95% of your problem can be enough for the problems you would use a quantum computer in the first place. In other cases, your chance is somewhere between 99 and 100 percent so you practically still have a definitive answer.
The part that doesn't make sense is how a guess on a QC in a binary is any better than a scientist just guessing an outcome from a binary. Yeah, it can do it a lot, but if you can't test the outcome to verify if it's correct or not, how is it better than any other way of guessing outcomes?
Statistically, it absolutely isn't. Even if it continually narrows things down via guesses, it's still no more valuable than any other guesses. Because in all the whitepapers I've seen, it's not calculating anything because it can't. It's simply assuming that one option is correct.
In the real world, it's not a calculation and it doesn't assist in... anything really. It's no better than a random number generator assigning those numbers to a result. I don't get the utility other than potentially breaking numerical cryptography.