QUANTUM COMPUTING YEARS AWAY

According to NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang, quantum computing is at least 15-30 years away. It is much further away, perhaps never in our lifetimes.

The idea of quantum computing has a fundamental flaw. It is related to the fact that quantum qubits violate my newly discovered law.

The law states that the quantum state of a real quantum system cannot be determined.

In essence, it is a one-liner stating that it is impossible to know what a quantum system is doing.

This is not a Heisenberg uncertainty principle that imposes restrictions on the momentum and position of particles, as well as on energy and time.

It is also not a measurement issue discussed by the founders of quantum mechanics, namely Bohr.

This applies to any quantum system before the measurement is made.

A quantum system is probabilistic, and its wavefunction is always in superposition with random noise, resulting from its probabilistic nature. The noise and the probabilistic nature cannot be separated. The confusion originates from the fact that all books on quantum mechanics have plenty of solved examples for different quantum structures. They assume that the structure produces no noise so that it can be solved relatively quickly in most cases. However, adding a random noise complicates things a bit.

In summary, practical quantum computers will not be available in 50 or 100 years. Even if someone discovers new fundamental particles, those particles will also be probabilistic and subject to my newly discovered fundamental law.

Those considerations are valid for a single particle or a small number of particles. A different approach is possible once the number of particles is more significant. Many existing working devices are built around those principles. Once those devices become smaller, as in MOS transistors of very advanced chips, their behavior will change, becoming random and unusable.

If you want to verify if those ideas are indeed correct, try this example.

1) Pick a quantum qubit, quantum gate, or some other quantum device that relies on a small number of particles, usually electrons or photons, sometimes atoms or ions.

2) Initialize that device and try to set its initial state to your liking.

3) Determine that state using any method, such as electrical measurement, photon emission, etc.

4) Record that data.

5) Repeat steps 2, 3, and 4 a relatively large number of times, thousands, tens of thousands, or more. The maximum number will depend on the speed of your setup.

6) Plot distribution of collected data.

7) If the distribution is relatively broad, the randomness of your device is confirmed. Your device cannot be initialized to a reproducible initial state. You cannot build a quantum computer out of such devices.

8) The distribution would be a vertical line if the device were not random. Such devices do not exist. The nature around us is probabilistic, and noise is always associated with it. You cannot change that.

Original post - from Investopedia.

#quantumcomputing #NVIDIA #JensenHuang