MIT scientists build world's first scalable quantum computer

a reply to: Bedlam

Some of them, not much.

That is why "Closed Doors" is used, it is plural, "Behind all Closed Doors that Exist" is another way of phrasing it. I presume there would be quite a few decoys, or layering used to warn of possible compromisation. A word which I spent five minutes trying to remember.

Others, well, you'll never see it in your lifetime unless you get Captain Candid in the White house, and he survives the first few assassination attempts.

I can never tell if you're joking or being dead serious when it comes to these things.

It's things such as this that simply make me want to tear off the veil of secrecy.
Perhaps it would reveal a gaping, festering wound. Or perhaps discovery beyond conscious imagination.

It irritates me.
It irritates me more than I believe you could understand in your lifetime.

originally posted by: Eilasvaleleyn

it is plural, "Behind all Closed Doors that Exist" is another way of phrasing it. I presume there would be quite a few decoys, or layering used to warn of possible compromisation. A word which I spent five minutes trying to remember.

There are also a lot of secrets that aren't particularly surprising, or meaningful. The gubmint has a lot of trouble making reasonable distinctions. Mostly because security wonks are concrete thinkers. It goes with the job.

I can never tell if you're joking or being dead serious when it comes to these things.

I was actually being serious. There are a few Real Big Things that I know about, can't imagine how many more I don't. But it's not appropriate to let some dogs off the leash into the mens publica.

Perhaps it would reveal a gaping, festering wound. Or perhaps discovery beyond conscious imagination.

It irritates me.
It irritates me more than I believe you could understand in your lifetime.

Larry Niven once said "There are some things Man was not meant to know", as a joke one-line story. However, it is sometimes true.

Some things are interestingly weird. But generally are things that don't make sense to the average reader. You might ask yourself exactly WHY the Air Force throws money at Bose-Einstein condensate research, for example. OTOH, the Navy blowing tax dollars on compact, cheap, dependable orbital angular momentum detectors/modulators makes sense for THEM; it's a nutritious component of their black project breakfast. Where that dual-uses down to YOU, is that one day not to far in the future, you'll be getting really high bandwidth fiber optic to the curb, using the same fiber that's saturated out at present.

Hey, the microprocessor you're using came from a program with its roots in missile control logic. A lot of this stuff ends up in your house in some way, albeit not the way it started off.

This is quite in interesting experience!
-rps6kb1

It sounds like they haven't really scaled the problem as much as they've optimized it by a factor of 3.

Related MIT article

Now, in a paper published today in the journal Science, researchers from MIT and the University of Innsbruck in Austria report that they have designed and built a quantum computer from five atoms in an ion trap. The computer uses laser pulses to carry out Shor’s algorithm on each atom, to correctly factor the number 15. The system is designed in such a way that more atoms and lasers can be added to build a bigger and faster quantum computer, able to factor much larger numbers. The results, they say, represent the first scalable implementation of Shor’s algorithm.

Mark Ritter, senior manager of physical sciences at IBM, says the group’s method of recycling qubits reduces the resources required in the system by a factor of 3 — a significant though small step towards scaling up quantum computing.

“Improving the state-of-the-art by a factor of 3 is good,” says Ritter. But truly scaling the system “requires orders of magnitude more qubits, and these qubits must be shuttled around advanced traps with many thousands of simultaneous laser control pulses.”

If the team can successfully add more quantum components to the system, Ritter says it will have accomplished a long-unrealized feat.

This system doesn't sound like it will scale very well. Reducing the complexity by 3, but then simultaneously adding thousands of laser pulses (hardware operations) doesn't sound particularly scalable... particularly since they only solved 15 = 3*5 with 99% confidence.

But good luck to them, none-the-less.

Update: To clarify - adding more hardware for qubits has been the biggest problem to scaling, since all of the qubits need to stay in a state of quantum entanglement to do the calculations (incredibly difficult and expensive). However, adding lots of high-performance lasers sounds like it would also turn into a scaling problem. So your choice is either lots of qubits and fewer lasers, or fewer qubits and lots of lasers.