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$100,000 Prize: Prove Quantum Computers Impossible
mikejuk writes "Quantum computing is currently a major area of research — but is this all a waste of effort? Now Scott Aaronson, a well-known MIT computer scientist, has offered a prize of $100,000 for any proof that quantum computers are impossible: 'I'm now offering a US$100,000 award for a demonstration, convincing to me, that scalable quantum computing is impossible in the physical world.' Notice the two important conditions — 'physical world' and 'scalable.' The proof doesn't have to rule out tiny 'toy' quantum computers, only those that could do any useful work."
Just point a gun at his head and ask him "Convinced?"
Err, uh,
Didn't D-Wave sell a commercial Quantum computer to Locheed Martin in 2010? Almost a year to the day?
Someone explain to me the difference between this quantum computer and the one they're trying to prove doesn't exist, please.
moox. for a new generation.
I will prove Quantum Computers both possible AND impossible at the SAME TIME!
So I guess the proof would be that they do exist, but only if you don't observe one.
Never answer an anonymous letter. - Yogi Berra
D-Wave uses quantum annealing. This works for minimization problems, although it's unclear whether it's better than "simulated annealing". This does not work for problems like factoring integers, which "real" quantum computers can do.
(T>t && O(n)--) == sqrt(666)
There's some needed context.
Aaronson himself works on quantum complexity theory. Much of his work deals with quantum computers (at a conceptual level--what is and isn't possible). Yet there are some people who reject the idea the quantum computers can scale to "useful" sizes--including some very smart people like Leonid Levin (of Cook-Levin Theorem fame)--and some of them send him email, questions, comments on his blog, etc. saying so. These people are essentially asserting that Aaronson's career is rooted in things that can't exist. Thus, Aaronson essentially said "prove it."
It's true that proving such a statement would be very difficult, and you raise some good points as to why. But the context is that Aaronson gets mail and questions all the time from people who simply assert that scalable QC is impossible, and he's challenging them to be more formal about it.
He also mentions, in fairness, that if he does have to pay out, he'd consider it an honor, because it would be a great scientific advance.
This is a gross misunderstanding of the Schrodinger's cat thought experiment, and something of a fallacious presentation of it.
I don't think there was ever any doubt that a cat locked in a box for a sufficient length of time would expire. That is neither in doubt nor interesting.
The formulation deals with the status of a cat in a box present with some measuring apparatus capable of detecting decay of some isotope, linked to a sealed capsule of some poison, in a sealed container with a cat. Supposing the isotope has a roughly 50% chance of decaying in the next five minutes, and iff it decays the poison is released (killing the cat), after five minutes is the cat alive or dead?
The "collapse the waveform pseudo-science b***s***" here is simply translating the simultaneous probabilistic states into a single actual one. The reason this is relevant is in quantum mechanics there are real, measurable effects that occur as a result of the probabilistic waveform that differ from the effects of the collapsed state -- once you know whether the cat is alive or dead, in other words, you have a fundamentally different system than before it was observed.