Willow quantum chip demonstrates verifiable quantum advantage on hardware

The last time I heard a similar news from Google, it turned out they were solving a quantum phenomenon using a quantum phenomenon. It seems to be the same pattern here. Not to say it's not progress, but kind of feels like overhyped.

Idk. I get this is the median take across many comments, I don’t mean to be disagreeable with a crowd. But I don’t know why using quantum phenomena is a sign something’s off. It’s a quantum computer! But I know something is off with this take if it didn’t strike you that way.

To me, it matters because it's a sign that it might not be particularly transferable as a method of computation.

A wind tunnel is a great tool for solving aerodynamics and fluid flow problems, more efficiently than a typical computer. But we don't call it a wind-computer, because it's not a useful tool outside of that narrow domain.

The promise of quantum computing is that it can solve useful problems outside the quantum realm - like breaking traditional encryption.

Good point, I guess that's why I find this comments section boring and not representative of the HN I've known for 16 years: there's a sort of half-remembering it wasn't powerful enough to do something plainly and obviously useful yesterday.

Then, we ignore today, and launder that into a gish-gallop of free-association, torturing the meaning of words to shoehorn in the idea that all the science has it wrong and inter alia, the quantum computer uses quantum phenomena to computer so it might be a fake useless computer, like a wind tunnel. shrugs

It's a really unpleasant thing to read, reminds me of the local art school dropout hanging on my ear about crypto at the bar at 3 am in 2013.

I get that's all people have to reach for, but personally, I'd rather not inflict my free-association on the world when I'm aware I'm half-understanding, fixated on the past when discussing something current, and I can't explain the idea I have as something concrete and understandable even when I'm using technical terms.