Practical quantum computing and getting things done

For those of you listening to the audio version this week you may have noticed that we moved from the natural vocal capture to the narration vocal capture. I’m still recording the podcast audio for this adventure using a Blue Microphones Yeti X and my MacBook Air with the included GarageBand software. To further enhance your listening experience I’m still working to dial in the best possible recording technique to deliver superior podcast audio. 

Last week we really dug deep into the major corporate players that released quantum computing programing languages for general use. This week unfortunately needs to start with an epic spoiler alert. Please know that you should be aware that it does not appear quantum computing is practical at this time or really very scalable. I have read a fair number of jokes throughout the last week about neither the blockchain or quantum computer being scalable. With that spoiler delivered upfront this week it is time to move from the breadth of coverage to the depth of understanding related to what people are actually doing with practical use cases within the quantum computing space. One of the places I went to search around and learn a little bit more about use cases was the NASA Quantum Artificial Intelligence Laboratory [1]. The good folks over at NASA shared a paper in June of 2024 that was about “Assessing and Advancing the Potential of Quantum Computing: A NASA Case Study” [2]. For those of you wanting to read more quantum computing papers this is pretty easy to read and digest. It’s 27 pages and is very well cited throughout. 

You can join the quantum computing reddit community and it seems to be pretty active with academic discussion amongst the 50k+ members [3]. Beyond that reddit community the next place I ended up spending some time looking around was the Quantum Open Source Foundation which had a lot of content in terms of links [4]. They have a lot of curated links on the GitHub page that they maintain [5]. You could spend hours and hours of time just clicking around and looking at all of those projects. Eventually I ran into another GitHub repository called Awesome Quantum Computing that is another collection of curated links [6]. These collections of links will send you all over the place to see some interesting projects people are developing. 

Somehow during the hunt for the best projects using quantum computing to accomplish things I ended up back looking at the IBM Quantum Learning pages to see what things they were encouraging people to code as they learn to program [7]. The Azure Quantum team had a whole section devoted to trying to explain what solutions they are offering [8]. A lot of that seems to be focused on physics, chemistry, and ultimately material discovery and other applied applications to understand some type of complex interaction. Modeling really complex things seems to be a core use case that quantum computing has centered on based on the available evidence. I really think at this point I’m going to invest some time into completing a couple of these courses to get more hands on in the quantum computing space. I’ll share one last note about the fastest quantum computer that now has 1,180 qubits from Atom Computing [9]. It was a sizable leap from the IBM’s Osprey that was capable of 433 qubits. Hopefully we will see a bunch of fastest quantum computer records broken in the coming years. That will be a good sign that things have forward momentum in the quantum computing space.

Things to consider this week:

1. You might want to read the 15,000 word October 2024 essay from Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei called “Machines of loving grace.” https://darioamodei.com/machines-of-loving-grace 

2. The Anthropic team also released an updated responsible scaling policy that is a related read with the Dario Amodei essay https://www.anthropic.com/news/announcing-our-updated-responsible-scaling-policy 

3. I enjoyed listening to Yannic Kilcher talk about and question a paper this week “GSM-Symbolic: Understanding the Limitations of Mathematical Reasoning in Large Language Models” https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.05229

Footnotes:

[1] https://www.nasa.gov/intelligent-systems-division/discovery-and-systems-health/nasa-quail/ 

[2] https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.15601 

[3] https://www.reddit.com/r/QuantumComputing/ 

[4] https://qosf.org/project_list/ 

[5] https://github.com/qosf/awesome-quantum-software 

[6] https://github.com/desireevl/awesome-quantum-computing 

[7]

https://learning.quantum.ibm.com/

 

[8] https://quantum.microsoft.com/en-us/solutions/azure-quantum-solutions 

[9] https://www.newscientist.com/article/2399246-record-breaking-quantum-computer-has-more-than-1000-qubits/ 

What’s next for The Lindahl Letter? At some point this series will move back to being planned out 5 weeks ahead of publication. 

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