from the cat's-not-dead-until-the-box-is-opened dept.
Quantum Brilliance was founded in 2019 on the back of research undertaken by its founders at the Australian National University, where they developed techniques to manufacture, scale and control qubits embedded in synthetic diamond.
The company has already built a number of "Quantum development kits" in rack units, each with around 5 qubits to work with, and it's placing them with customers already, for benchmarking, integration, co-design opportunities and to let companies start working out where they'll be advantageous once they hit the market in a ~50-qubit "Quantum Accelerator" product form by around 2025. "We think over a decade," says Luo, "we can even produce a quantum system-on-a-chip for mobile devices. Because this is truly material science technology that can achieve that." From their whitepaper, the technical description of their technique is:
Room-temperature diamond quantum computers consist of an array of processor nodes. Each processor node is comprised of a nitrogen-vacancy (NV) center (a defect in the diamond lattice consisting of a substitutional nitrogen atom adjacent to a vacancy) and a cluster of nuclear spins: the intrinsic nitrogen nuclear spin and up to ~4 nearby 13C nuclear spin impurities. The nuclear spins act as the qubits of the computer, whilst the NV centers act as quantum buses that mediate the initialization and readout of the qubits, and intra-and inter-node multi-qubit operations. Quantum computation is controlled via radiofrequency, microwave, optical and magnetic fields.
"In terms of commercial deployment," says Luo, "we have the Pawsey Supercomupting Center, which is currently the Southern Hemisphere's largest supercomputing center, co-owned by CSIRO and some other universities. We established basically Australia's first supercompuing quantum innovation hub, and we set up a Pawsey Pioneer program where industry and research groups can utilize our quantum operating system.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 08 2021, @04:27PM (2 children)
but fools and their money are soon parted.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 08 2021, @04:43PM
$100 smartphone, 100 qubits. Let's make it happen.
(Score: 3, Touché) by TrentDavey on Monday November 08 2021, @05:55PM
I thought it was "fools and my money are soon partners" ?
Am I doing this wrong?
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Freeman on Monday November 08 2021, @04:57PM (15 children)
Quantum computing seems to be more about solving solved problems than actually being useful at this point. Sure, it may be useful in the future, but right now, it's all theoretical.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 08 2021, @05:05PM (3 children)
Quantum computing is like an onion. Layers and whatnot.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 08 2021, @05:09PM
Ogres are like onions. Onions are like opinions about quantum computing. They all stink.
(Score: 3, Funny) by GlennC on Monday November 08 2021, @08:52PM (1 child)
Y'know what else has layers?
Parfaits have layers.
Parfaits are delicious.
Have you ever met a person, you say, "Let's get some parfait," they say, "No, I don't like no parfait"
Sorry folks...the world is bigger and more varied than you want it to be. Deal with it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 08 2021, @09:09PM
a parfait made from onions..laced with qbits..so many layers.
(Score: 3, Informative) by FatPhil on Monday November 08 2021, @05:22PM (6 children)
It's certainly frustrating, and I do look forward to a concrete computational achievement that would have been wanted, but impossible historically. Heck, I'm a simple mathematician - I'd be satisfied by some RSA factorisations, but won't hold my breath. If Shor thinks his algorithm won't scale in the real world, who am I to counter that?
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 4, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Monday November 08 2021, @05:57PM (5 children)
As I understand the impediments to progress, it has to do with what I conceptualize as "conservation of difficulty."
It seems that, unlike conventional bits which can just be tacked on for a doubling of numerical range with linear cost per bit, additional qbits ramp the cost/difficulty of construction of a "quantum register" in exponential fashion: 1 qbit: relatively easy, 2 qbits: twice as costly/difficult, 3 qbits are not then 50% more costly/difficult than 2, but again twice as costly/difficult, 4 qbits are again twice the cost of 3, and so on. In other words, it would seem that the difficulty and cost of scaling a quantum computer more or less matches its purported ability to more directly solve that limited set of problems they have been proposed to be "superior" at.
It's a new and relatively unknown field, so there is great hope of opportunities for discovery that will tip that ratio to "quantum superiority," but that term has already been abused into absurdity.
What I found interesting about Quantum Brilliance (beyond their use of diamond, not unlike the gold employed in the best ICs of the 1970s) is their replacement of supercooled electrons with room temperature atomic nuclei. Apparently the ~x12000 mass increase makes this room temperature operation possible, and I wonder what other benefits it might bring? If the atomic nuclei are supercooled, does that present the opportunity for larger supercooled quantum registers? What about even more massive qbits, perhaps a microgram of supercooled iridium per bit? Would that be a practical route to quantum registers large enough to demonstrate Shor on a 512 bit key?
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Monday November 08 2021, @08:15PM (4 children)
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday November 08 2021, @08:33PM (3 children)
So, does the difficulty/cost of maintaining coherence among quantum elements scale linearly with the number of elements, or is there another more-than-linear difficulty scaling there?
Quadratic effort per qbit definitely points the way toward eventual quantum superiority - at least for those few problems they can address. Also makes me wonder what's going on in the secret quantum labs around the world today, there are certainly a few of those doing their best to stay ahead of the commercial space.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Wednesday November 10 2021, @07:52AM (2 children)
However, your conservation of capability might still be the real killer blow that stops them from ever being broadly useful, because most quantum algorithms only achieve a sqrt() advantage over a classical one, not a log() one. Factorisation's a special case because of the fact that its peroid-finding is so closely related to reinforcement.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday November 10 2021, @11:54AM (1 child)
There are a few things where transformation to a different space does really make the problem easier: Fourier, Laplace... But I believe that is only because the conventional expression of the problem is poorly fit to the problem statements. Of course it will be easier to achieve a frequency domain goal using frequency domain calculations instead of time series....
So many other transform solutions are just different, but no easier than the untransformed solution. Not just in mathematics, but also in squishy space like program management, quality control, programming languages, etc.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Thursday November 11 2021, @08:56AM
Just refreshed my memory, and Shor's has O(D^(2+eps)) space built into it, that's not a noise-management aspect, that's a theoretical minimum. So, indeed, it looks like millions of coherent Qbits will be needed for any interesting problems. Not gonna happen in my lifetime, I'm sure, and I've got everal decades left.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: -1, Spam) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 08 2021, @06:18PM (1 child)
"Quantum computers? Until I can use them to watch child porn, they're all just theoretical."
-DannyB, 2021.
(Score: -1, Spam) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 08 2021, @11:30PM
If a kid is shut in a box in a CP snuff movie watched on a quantum computer, is it dead or alive? And do I get any points for all the labor of making this joke?
(Score: 2) by SomeGuy on Monday November 08 2021, @09:17PM (1 child)
Oh, don't worry. They will eventually find a way to make them sell cell phones. Probably by adding blue LEDs and putting it in "the cloud" with some nice AI on top of it. And Windows 12 will require it, but nobody will know why.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 08 2021, @11:34PM
"security"
(Score: 3, Interesting) by HiThere on Monday November 08 2021, @06:56PM (6 children)
If they can make this work... Well, that's a pretty be if, but *if* they can make this work that will solve many of the problems of quantum computers. I've never been very impressed by things that depend on a supercooled state. It's too hard to sustain.
Please note, there are big reasons why folks working on superconductors work hard to raise the working temperature. Requiring them to be supercooled really restricts the possible applications. Similar arguments apply to quantum computers. As long as they are forced to be supercooled, there will be a market for maybe two per large country...and that's assuming they can hold their coherence long enough to be useful. But if you remove the requirement for supercooling, then lots of additional possibilities open up. Of course, it also means that current means of encryption will all be broken by small companies rather than just by large governments.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday November 08 2021, @07:48PM
3T MRIs are pretty awesome, as is LOx + LH2 fuel, but yeah, generally it's a lot of infrastructure for very little benefit.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Monday November 08 2021, @08:17PM (4 children)
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday November 08 2021, @09:36PM
Skynet will be space based...
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Tuesday November 09 2021, @01:54AM
Well, OK. If you build it to suit the environment, then that's a decent argument. But *I* have a hard time fitting into an environment based around 3K. So structures that I fit into don't easily handle things that need to be at 3K. Now there are times when making that match is worth the effort, but it takes a *LOT* of justification. (So, yes, this is one reason that manned space flights are rare.)
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 09 2021, @05:56PM (1 child)
Nope. Satellites aren't that cold.
https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/7827/whats-the-typical-temperature-of-a-satellite-orbiting-the-earth [stackexchange.com]
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Tuesday November 09 2021, @08:18PM
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 1) by engblom on Tuesday November 09 2021, @06:18AM
If this is true, then maybe it is possible to add more qubits by super cooling them? That could lead to a much more powerful quantum computer.