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Ask HN: Is quantum computing worth the struggle?

2 points by alexyan0431 ↗ HN
I am a phd student in quantum computing(QC), and recently I am a little depressed. Over the past few years I have heard a lot of inspiring news about the development of our field, which is exactly the reason that I chose to persue a doctoral degree in this filed.

But as I got closer to the frontline, I found more frustrating facts. The qubits are fragile, hard to maintain even for a single day, and the number are limited by all kinds of factors. The cost is huge, the devices are sensitive enough to feel the draft of room temperature. Not to mention there are few useful applications discovered for quantum algorithms. The beautiful visions seem to become a bubble, and it could burst at any time.

That makes me feel lost about the future: whether I should stick on this field? If not, where can I go? The most familiar things to me is quantum mechanics, and it's useless for almost every other fields.

Desperate...

8 comments

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manfromchina1
How far along are you? You could finish your phd, then get a two year diploma in mechatronics, electrical eng, instrumentation. All near future proof and apparently pay well enough. You could even cert up in NDT, IRATA, ROV and that sort of thing. With your phd you'd get your foot in the door pretty easily.
__patchbit__
Xaira_Thera is looking to hire an AI scientist in the biology space.

Wet warm room temperature quantum computing is believed possible and they are looking for evidence of it in photosynthesis. And, the AI says in summary, skyrmion memory in the quasiparticle space is a career in reach to wide spread application.

turtleyacht
You get to be the person who creates the PDP-11, the Unix, the B (or C) language: fundamental contributions that the majority take for granted, to build our dreams on.

It's ground-level with lots of unknowns. There's not going to be a lot of answers. It's the frontier. There's not a single book or body of knowledge that promises expertise or certification in the applied sense.

Exotic materials, probabilistic effects, cutting-edge research. Isn't that exciting? You get to refine your weaknesses, accept published contributions, and make the same.

fragmede
We want to know how drugs will work in the human brain, to heal Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, and Autism. Classical computing can't run the simulations necessary to model that, and we're not going to be like the Nazis and run unethical science experiments on unwilling human subjects, so we need quantum computing to be able to model on a computer how things will interact in order to help people. That qbits are sensitive to temperature changes… have you seen how sensitive to dust that integrated circuits are?
abacadaba00
The qubit is a dead end.

The future of quantum computing (which has not yet been invented or explored) is quantum holography.

This will be the mathematicians’ sweetest dreams. Manipulate quantum holographic memory space through constructive and destructive interference, multidimensional transformations, translations between surface areas, and the like. This will more closely resemble analog computing than digital.

The engineering problems today are relevant steps yet any programmatic exercises relying on qubits are useless. Spin disposition is not the most information dense aspect of the quantum domain.

The day will come, only not any time soon.

alexyan0431
I'm not an expert in quantum holography, but as far as I know, it's a kind of fault tolerance framework. If so, then the most fundamental layer of this technical route would still be qubits, only the requirements for scale or fidelity are looser. Actually I also believe in Fault Tolerant quantum computing, and many great works have been done. But the sad story is our lab chose a route that is not fault-tolerance friendly (at least for now), so I'm a little nervous. Anyway I hope the day will come soon.
abacadaba00
The “qubit” or “spin disposition” is the only discretely identifiable information layer we may technologically access. Multidimensional analog “images” may be stored and retrieved (by passive differential) in this space, without collapsing entanglement. Hyperdimensionality means there are dimensionalities folded into the domain like origami. All of this may someday be accessed, and I’m pretty sure this is happening in our very own brains.