Quantum Surge

As I mentioned to my (quantum-research)  colleagues from Portugal – Claudio, Gabriel and João –  on our bi-weekly zoom call this morning, I was originally planning to post about F1 Abu Dhabi, focusing on (no surprise! see True Grip and  Ford v Ferrari) Ferrari v McLaren:

McLaren Rules Constructor’s Championship.

You know of my Quantum Serenity (and, of course, Quantum Rubbish, see also Great Exaggerations).

Many of you, no doubt, have read about the Google announcement of Willow, such as this one from BBC:

Google unveils ‘mind-boggling’ quantum computing chip

Or seen this video:

Quite early in the article:

However, experts say Willow is, for now, a largely experimental device, meaning a quantum computer powerful enough to solve a wide range of real-world problems is still years – and billions of dollars – away.

And a bit later:

He [Chief Optimist Hartmut Neven] told the BBC that Willow would be used in some practical applications – but declined, for now, to provide more detail. But a chip able to perform commercial applications would not appear before the end of the decade, he said.

This did not stop the tremendous run up of publicly traded stocks related to quantum computing. Certainly, this will delay any Quantum Winter for a bit, even if this surge turns out to be a Quantum Bubble.

I was also reminded of:

Willow is a 1988 American sword and sorcery epic dark fantasy adventure film directed by Ron Howard and executive produced by George Lucas. The film stars Val Kilmer, Joanne Whalley, Warwick Davis, and Jean Marsh. It grossed $137.6 million worldwide against a $35 million budget.  It received two Academy Award nominations.

So, I previously wanted to title this post as Quantum Sorcery:

The first records of the word sorcery come from the 1200s. It ultimately comes from the Latin sortiārius, meaning “person who casts lots” (referring to a person who tells fortunes). Fictionally speaking, sorcery is a magic (the kind with supernatural power, not the kind with card tricks).

I decided against it although one could cast Google‘s quantum hype as borderline immoral practice:

The term sorcery in Scripture [Bible] is continually used in reference to an immoral or false practice. Sorcery can be seen as an effort to circumvent God’s knowledge and sovereignty and to worship Satan instead.

You may find it interesting to read Scott Aaronson’s blog post (and its links, with perspectives from Gil Kalai and Sabine Hossenfelder):

The Google Willow thing.

Some excerpts:

Sundar Pichai tweeted about Willow, and Elon Musk replied “Wow.” It cannot be denied that those are both things that happened.

Yes, it’s a real milestone for the field. And yet, even if the progress is broadly in line with what most of us expected, it’s still of course immensely gratifying to see everything actually work!

To clarify, what we’re all talking about now is the same basic technical advance that Google already reported in August, except now with the PR blitz from Sundar Pichai on down, a Nature paper, an official name for the chip (“Willow”), and a bunch of additional details about it.

Here is the  tweet from Sabine Hossenfelder:

The particular calculation in question is to produce a random distribution. The result of this calculation has no practical use. They use this particular problem because it has been formally proven (with some technical caveats) that the calculation is difficult to do on a conventional computer (because it uses a lot of entanglement). That also allows them to say things like “this would have taken a septillion years on a conventional computer” etc.

It’s exactly the same calculation that they did in 2019 on a ca 50 qubit chip. In case you didn’t follow that, Google’s 2019 quantum supremacy claim was questioned by IBM pretty much as soon as the claim was made and a few years later a group said they did it on a conventional computer in a similar time. So while the announcement is super impressive from a scientific pov and all, the consequences for everyday life are zero.

Estimates say that we will need about 1 million qubits for practically useful applications and we’re still about 1 million qubits away from that. Also, it’s been a recurring story that we have seen numerous times in the past years, that claims of quantum “utility” or quantum “advantage” or quantum “supremacy” or whatever you want to call it later evaporate because some other group finds a clever way to do it on a conventional computer after all.

On a less critical note, and taking a more academic, longer term viewpoint regarding extraordinarily difficult and potentially radical engineering and technological progress, the technical breakthrough that was accomplished is indeed a welcome one as it physically demonstrated something that was theoretically developed (in 1995, by Peter Shor) for the first time (Magic Number? Seven!) increasing the possibility of building larger scale, fault-tolerant quantum computers.

I also stayed with surge in the title of my post as 2024 has indeed been one with five quantum publications from Tepper Quantum Group:

ANTHONY KARAHALIOS, SRIDHAR TAYUR, ANANTH TENNETI, AMIRREZA PASHAPOUR, F. SIBEL SALMAN, BARIŞ YILDIZ. A Quantum Inspired Bi-level Optimization Algorithm for the First Responder Network Design Problem. Informs Journal on Computing.

C. GOMES, J.P. FERNANDES, G. FALCAO, S. KAR and S. TAYUR. A Systematic Mapping Study on Quantum and Quantum-inspired Algorithms in Operations Research. JACM (Computing Surveys).

 V. SIDDHU,A. CHATTERJEE,K. JAGANNATHAN, P. MANDAYAM, AND S. TAYUR.  Unital Qubit Queue-channels: Classical Capacity and Product Decoding.  IEEE Transactions on Quantum Engineering.

SAI SAKUNTHALA GUDDANTI, APURVA PADHYE, ANIL PRABHAKAR AND SRIDHAR TAYUR.  Pneumonia Detection by Binary Classification: Classical, Quantum, and Hybrid Approaches for Support Vector Machine (SVM). Frontiers of Computer Science.

SRIDHAR TAYUR AND ANANTH TENNETI. Quantum Annealing Research at CMU: Algorithms, Hardware, Applications. Frontiers of Computer Science.

 Looking forward to presenting some of this work in an exciting upcoming event in 2025:

Dear Sridhar,

I am writing to extend a special invitation to you as we celebrate the 75th anniversary of our school with an academic symposium. The symposium will take place on Friday, March 21 and Saturday, March 22, 2025, at the Tepper Quad in Pittsburgh, PA.

As part of our celebration, we are recognizing current and past faculty and PhD alumni through sessions with research presentations.  I would like to invite you to present your current research in one of these sessions. We are honored that the Tepper School of Business has been part of your successful academic journey and would be thrilled if you could join us and share your latest work with our community.

The audience will include specialists in your field as well as an interdisciplinary faculty, so we are looking for topics that are accessible to a general audience.

Warm regards,

Ravi

Here is my tentative title and abstract for the academic symposium:

QuOROM: Quantum, Operations Research and Operations Management.

The Second Quantum Revolution – comprising of Quantum Computing, Quantum Communications and Quantum Sensing – promises unprecedented abilities to improve the human condition, in a variety of ways, from improving health (through exciting applications of Quantum Machine Learning and Quantum Sensing) to improving cyber security (Quantum Communications). It also promises to do so using less energy than purely digital methods.

At Tepper Quantum Group, we are exploring the twin questions: (a) what can Quantum do for OR and OM and (b) what can OR and OM do for Quantum. In this talk, I will present an overview of our progress to date – in algorithms, hardware and applications (AHA) – and highlight a few current initiatives.

Hope to see many of you in person then!