Quantum Computing: A view from the enemy camp

SIGFPE writes "There seems to be an unthinking acceptance by many people that quantum computers are now on their unstoppable way up and before too long we'll be cracking RSA and simulating protein folding on complex quantum computers. However there is another point of view that considers quantum computers to be as difficult to make as perpetual motion machines - and for much the same reason: entropy. As an antidote to all the successes that have been reported on /. here is a just published and highly readable preprint by a sceptical mathematical physicist."

Comments

This is all well and good.

[CyberBlood]

While everything stated in this paper is all well and good and valid, he's missing the fundamental point of innovation.

You make no progress with pessimism.

CyberBlood

Re:This is all well and good.

[Jerf]

False idealism doesn't get far either. "If we just keep working on the epicycles, maybe we can finally crack the orbit problem!"

Re:This is all well and good.

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry, the orbit problem has already been cracked.

looking sideways

[Perdo]

If it is possible for quantum computers to look sideways into parallel universes to perform their calculations and evolution dictates that any lifeform that does not take full advantage of its enviroment will not survive to procreate then humans must have a latent ability to percieve parallel worlds too.

If it is possible to utilize parallel processing then life would have had to evolve the ability to take advantage of that.

Since we don't all have ESP then quantum computers are bullshit.

And no, we don't want to hear about the dog in the UK that knows when its owner has made the decision to come home.

Re:looking sideways

[famebait]

> any lifeform that does not take full advantage of its enviroment will not survive

Whoah. So any phenomenon seen or imagined in science that is not manifested in humans is bullshit? And furthermore, all lifeforms can in fact swim, fly, breathe and photosynthesize and do all other things that are possible for a life form to do; either that or the very theoretical possibility of a doing these things is bullshit?

Re:looking sideways

[Pentagram]

And because no organisms use lasers as a defensive weapon, they cannot exist?

evolution dictates that any lifeform that does not take full advantage of its enviroment will not survive to procreate

Evolution dictates nothing of the sort. All that happens is the fittest of any set of organisms is more likely to survive. There is no guarantee of optimality (otherwise I would currently be making a fortune with my perfect genetic algorithm-evolved stock market model).

Re:looking sideways

[dachshund]

If it is possible for quantum computers to look sideways into parallel universes to perform their calculations and evolution dictates that any lifeform that does not take full advantage of its enviroment will not survive to procreate then humans must have a latent ability to percieve parallel worlds too.

Which is totally incorrect, as the other two posters made clear.

However, an element of quantum-computing in the human brain would be an amazing thing to find. It would certainly change the debate on whether humans have a "soul", or are simply elaborate meat computers.

Re:looking sideways

[SIGFPE]

For some speculative ideas along these lines you could do worse than read Teranesia by Greg Egan. Actually Egan thinks the idea is purel hokum but at least one biologist has taken the ideas in Teranesia seriously.

Re:looking sideways

[SIGFPE]

Why would it change the debate on whether humans have souls? My memory is poor but I don't recall any religion that makes any connection between quantum computing and souls.

Re:looking sideways

[dachshund]

Why would it change the debate on whether humans have souls?

There has always been an uneasy feeling in religious camps that a complete understanding of the human brain could reveal us to be nothing more than complex automatons who "think" we're more than simple machines. It's certainly not mentioned in the bible, but there has been a lot of philisophical discussion of these matters.

From this point of view, one of the worst things that could happen is that we could someday understand every aspect of the brain, and thus human behavior. There wouldn't be room for a soul. Of course, faith is faith, and you don't have to see it on paper to believe. But it would cause a lot of people to doubt.

On the other hand, if the human brain does employ quantum principles, it leaves the door open to something much more complex. This doesn't in any way prove or disprove the existence of a soul, but it might preclude our scientifically devaluing the notion... It's far easier to understand a machine when parts of its workings aren't shrouded in quantum uncertainty. Even better, if some of the fundamental calculations that underly human thought take place in the quantum realm, then you can't predict human behavior-- it becomes not only mysterious by way of its complexity, but also because of the fundamental laws of the universe. If you believe that the unpredictable quantum workings of the universe are controlled by a higher power, and the brain is somewhat governed by those laws, then there's at least an opening for the existence of what might be considered a soul.

As to your point, I don't think very many religions discuss this as few of them tend to think about quantum computing, and even fewer expect the human brain to be understood in our lifetime. But someday these issues could be more significant to religious belief than Darwin's theory of evolution ever was, depending on what we learn. Now I don't know if that's a good thing-- although I like the idea that the human brain might be more than a few zillion simple switches.

Re:looking sideways

[Anonymous Coward]

I like the idea that the human brain might be just a few zillion simple switches.

It would free up those efforts that are currently tied down in trying to save the souls of unbelievers.

Re:looking sideways

[SIGFPE]

I still don't get the connection between souls and quantum mechanics.

I don't recall any religious tradition that makes unpredictability a property of souls. In fact man religious traditions claim an omniscient God making souls entirely predictable. And even if they did claim an association betwen uncertainty and souls I see no reason for that to be evidence for the existence of souls, because, as I point out, people were unable to predict human behaviour before QM was invented.

Why would unpredictability leave room for a 'higher power'? If it turned out that these so-called random events were controlled by such a power they would no longer be random would they? They'd be amenable to study like anything else. If we expect something to happen 50% of the time but due to a higher power it happened 51% of the time instead then that wouldn't be QM 'leaving room', it'd be QM being wrong. QM in fact leaves no room for such 'higher powers' because the 'random' quantum events are just as subject to the laws of statistics as any other random event.

Anyway, why might there not be laws describing these 'higher powers'?

Re:looking sideways

[HBD]

whos says we are even lifeforms, i think we are just the decendants of a few 'random' organic molecules combining that happened to have the ability to recreate themselves and the recreations wern't always the same, thus evolution through mutation.

Re:looking sideways

[SIGFPE]

That your own code doesn't find optimal solutions to a problem has little to contribute to the issue of how optimal evolution is.

Re:looking sideways

[dachshund]

I don't recall any religious tradition that makes unpredictability a property of souls.

There has been an enormous amount of discussion of these subjects, including many debates and conferences between scientists and religious figures, attempting to determine what neurological research means for the existence of the soul.

One of the more sacred aspects of the soul is its ability to exist independently of heredity and environment, and yet still to influence our actions as human beings-- in other words, give us independence from simple physical needs. Free will, in other words. One of the reasons a complete understanding of the brain is so troubling to religion, is that it quite possibly may show that our minds (and thus the decisions we make) are a straightforward deterministic machine.

If this is the case, so some fear, there can be no room for the soul; there can be no room for an external component of our mind that influences our actions, and yet does not permanently reside in our body (ie, it existed before we were born, and will continue to exist after we die.)

Does non-determinism fix the problem? Some say yes, some say no. Those who see quantum randomness as a pure random function (that is, not only statistically random, but truly not influenced by the "hand of God") would say absolutely not-- putting a slot machine into the brain doesn't leave room for divinity.

On the other hand, putting a slot machine into the brain does make it more than a simple deterministic machine. There is room for something that's not simply animal. Does that mean that those random decisions are "the soul", or are "God"? Maybe-- if you believe that God is omniscient, and therefore not bound by physical laws, you can posit that those apparently "random" decisions, in God's hands, might have meaning. Even if a statistical analysis shows them to be a creamy 50% one way, 50% another, if you accept that God dictates the unknowable state of every particle even before it's measured, then you can posit that there might be something else influencing the human mind. Whether that something else exists, or is just a hope, I can't tell you.

Even if the brain is found to be a deterministic machine, for which every single thought and action can be simulated by a suitably complex computer, that doesn't rule out the existence of the human soul. But it might be harder for many to accept.

In fact man religious traditions claim an omniscient God making souls entirely predictable

I'm not sure I understand what you're saying here. Many of the religions you speak of also state that the workings of God are unknowable by man. This doesn't necessarily imply that the soul is unpredictable-- that's a different question. But maybe you could clarify the above; how does the existence of an omniscient God make the soul predictable? Unless you constrain God to live within the bounds of the physical laws(which would make him less than omniscient), I don't see why God would require souls to be predictable or unpredictable.

Re:looking sideways

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, this is totally correct. The sentence you quote says "if A and B then C". This is absolutely correct. Not A. And not B. But "if A and B then C" definitely.

Re:looking sideways

[noc]

evolution dictates that any lifeform that does not take full advantage of its enviroment will not survive to procreate

Evolution dictates nothing of the sort. All that happens is the fittest of any set of organisms is more likely to survive. There is no guarantee of optimality

Evolution guarantees nothing. And fitness in the sense used by evolutionists is generally misunderstood. In addition to being fitness for a specific environment at a specific time (which of course includes any later-deceased competitors), it also includes dumb luck. If the the most wonderfully fit group of organisms on an island happen to get killed when the volcano goes off, they weren't that well fit for their environment after all.

Re:looking sideways

[SIGFPE]

God is omniscient => God can predict the behaviour of a person => the behavior of a person is predictable

Re:looking sideways

[dachshund]

Yes, but B is totally incorrect. Therefore the conclusion reached is totally incorrect; I wasn't critiquing the logic, which works fine (GIGO), but the assumptions and conclusions.

Re:looking sideways

[dachshund]

God is omniscient => God can predict the behaviour of a person => the behavior of a person is predictable

Predictable by God, who is outside of the constraints of the physical universe. While the soul may be completely predictable to God, it is assumed to be unpredictable by us-- or, that is, the tools of the physical universe.

Achieveable accuracy

[tony_gardner]

An interesting article, but it seems to rely on several strange arguments. I wouldn't agree that the accuracies required in manufacture and operation are not achieveable. It would seem to me that a fabrication accuracy of 1 part in 10^5 is scarcely unachieveable, especially since we have everyday devices, for example LCD monitors in which less than 1 pixel in 1 million is dead, and those are consumer products.

I don't necessarily buy his argument about the inherent fault-intolerence of quantum computing either, since it relies on the idea that a simple computer with no fault tolerence built in is fault intolerant! Scarcely a surprise. He didn't make a convincing argument that building in fault tolerance is impossible, only that it isn't being done in the simple designs he notes. Maybe I've misunderstood, but it would seem that this is an avenue for more research, rather than less.

It seems to me that in the end the whole of his argument relies on the engineering argument that we don't at present have any way to measure large numbers of single spin states (or indeed any single spin state). This would seem again to be an argument for more research, rather than less, since engineering serendipity is not a predictable mathematical process.

I understand his frustration that quantum computing is taking a lot of research funding from other areas, but I'd be a little more cautious than he is about saying that it definitely _can't_ work.

Re:Achieveable accuracy

[SIGFPE]

I'm inclined to compare building a quantum computer to building a perpetual motion machine. There is nothing in the fundamental laws of physics that says it's impossible. They're obviously not impossible, an individual atom is in effect in perpetual motion. But start building multi-atom constructions and it's going to get harder and harder. Although we don't have a macroscopic perpetual motion machine I'd be disinclined to actually put a limit on how big a perpetual motion machine can get. I just think it gets exponentially harder the larger you want it to be. The same goes for quantum computers - and for the very same reason: entropy.

Re:Achieveable accuracy

[superflex]

you're absolutely right about how atoms are in fact perpetual motion "machines". the whole idea of a "PMM" is a misnomer, because the idea behind it is not one of perpetual motion, but of perpetual work/energy. that's the part that isn't kosher, because it violates the first law of thermodynamics "energy cannot be created or destroyed".

Re:Achieveable accuracy

[norton_I]

I used to be a skeptic about the possibility of quantum computing, but I have become a believer. Here is why:

1) It once was thought that gate precisions would need to be accurate to 1 in 10^12 or so, depending on the length of the computation. The problem was, unlike classical computers, quantum computers are not allowed to "latch" to a 1 or 0. However, there has been a substantial body of work that has shown how to implement error correction codes on quantum computers, without destroying the computation.

2) Decoherence, or the problem with entropic contamination by the environment, is a serious one, and the one that was always thought to be the nail in the coffin. However, now that people have actually started trying to make systems resilient to decoherence, they have measured systems that decohere on time scales from ms to hours -- giving considerable time to do computation.

3) One particular QC proposal, germanium quantum dots on silicon, has made incredible progress recently. A couple of years ago, someone wrote down the "six impossible tasks to make Si quantum computers work", three of which have already been accomplished.

We have already accomplished so much in QC that people thought would be impossible, it hardly seems logical to give up now. I can't say for certain, obviously, that QC will ever be a reality, but I would give it better than 50-50 odds at the moment.

Re:Achieveable accuracy

[WolfWithoutAClause]

Further, people have actually demoed quantum mechanical electronics using MRI so the theory seems cosher.

Ok, a 4 bit circuit when you're aiming for ~10,000 bits is a bit restrictive, but atleast it shows proof of concept.

Re:parallel processing

[jvv62]

"If it is possible to utilize parallel processing then life would have had to evolve the ability to take advantage of that." - Perdo

Ummm....

While this sentence is taken out of context, it is still completely wrong. We use parallel processing all the time. The parallel computation part of quantum computing seems to work in both theory and in the lab as well.

Assume that there exists an efficient (classical) algorithm for calculating f(x) for a given x, however if n is large, say 1000, calculation for all x would take quite a lot of time. The quantum computer, in a certain sense, performs all these calculations much faster, during a time which is not exponential, but polynomial in n. (I note in passing, that the difficulty of building a quantum computer increases exponentially with n, which is a kind of Nature's revenge). -Dyakonov

The argument against QC is really much simpler than Perdo's convoluted logic requires. Dyakonov says that the problem isn't that a quantum computer couldn't do the calculations fast. The problem is that it would take nearly forever to build the computer in the first place.

Watch out for Clarke's First Law

[alispguru]

Found here among other places:

When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.

I don't know if the author in question qualifies here, but it is something to consider.

Re:Watch out for Clarke's First Law

[SIGFPE]

It's a good quotation with lots of relevance to many things in physics. However the word 'elderly' is crucial to the meaning of his quotation. We all know that we have to wait for the old generation of physicists to die off before a scientific revolution can be completed. The quantum computing critics aren't the sceptical old however - they're the enthusiastic young who think quantum computing is a cool subject but makes some fundamentally flawed assumptions.

OT: Really?

[Haeleth]

Even if it were proven conclusively that "souls", and all the other things that religions talk about, did not exist, I don't believe that would destroy religion. If the concepts are complex enough, as they almost have to be, that the non-specialist could never understand the proof, then the majority of people would have a simple choice: believe the scientists, who say that they're just machines, or believe the priests, who say that they're more than machines.

In other words, the situation would be just like it is now (Dawkins anyone?), except that the scientists would have a sacred book of their own.

Oh the humanity...

[TommyBear]

Don't you just love it when people write inflammatory scientific papers about how quantum computing is impossible with today's technology and then pop onto the forum to defend it... Truely sad.

quantum computer power requirements

[nobody/incognito]

i know there is some concern about the power requirements of quantum computers, but my physicist friends assure me that cold fusion reactors will provide all the power they need.

nobody

To all my dead hommies

[QuantumG]

As sung by the infamous Mc Hawking.

Entropy, how can I explain it? I'll take it frame by frame it,
to have you all jumping, shouting saying it.
Let's just say that it's a measure of disorder,
in a system that is closed, like with a border.
It's sorta, like a, well a measurement of randomness,
proposed in 1850 by a German, but wait I digress.
"What the fuck is entropy?", I here the people still exclaiming,
it seems I gotta start the explaining.

You ever drop an egg and on the floor you see it break?
You go and get a mop so you can clean up your mistake.
But did you ever stop to ponder why we know it's true,
if you drop a broken egg you will not get an egg that's new.

That's entropy or E-N-T-R-O to the P to the Y,
the reason why the sun will one day all burn out and die.
Order from disorder is a scientific rarity,
allow me to explain it with a little bit more clarity.
Did I say rarity? I meant impossibility,
at least in a closed system there will always be more entropy.
That's entropy and I hope that you're all down with it,
if you are here's your membership.

You down with entropy?
Yeah, you know me!
You down with entropy?
Yeah, you know me!
You down with entropy?
Yeah, you know me!
Who's down with entropy?
Every last homey!


Defining entropy as disorder's not complete,
'cause disorder as a definition doesn't cover heat.
So my first definition I would now like to withdraw,
and offer one that fits thermodynamics second law.
First we need to understand that entropy is energy,
energy that can't be used to state it more specifically.
In a closed system entropy always goes up,
that's the second law, now you know what's up.

You can't win, you can't break even, you can't leave the game,
'cause entropy will take it all 'though it seems a shame.
The second law, as we now know, is quite clear to state,
that entropy must increase and not dissipate.

Creationists always try to use the second law,
to disprove evolution, but their theory has a flaw.
The second law is quite precise about where it applies,
only in a closed system must the entropy count rise.
The earth's not a closed system' it's powered by the sun,
so fuck the damn creationists, Doomsday get my gun!
That, in a nutshell, is what entropy's about,
you're now down with a discount.


You down with entropy?
Yeah, you know me!
You down with entropy?
Yeah, you know me!
You down with entropy?
Yeah, you know me!
Who's down with entropy?
Every last homey!

Ack. Sorry about the Italics...

[Anonymous Coward]

I previewed this comment before I posted, and it was fine. I must have nicked one of the tags just before I hit "Submit". Very sorry.