My company does a lot of hackathons and we support a decent number of hackathons in quantum computing throughout the world. And I have had the same sentiment in the quantum computing space as well and thinking through the reason for it, my sense is that 24-48 hours is not enough time to build something meaningful. This is not to say that absolutely cannot be done, but the chances of something cool being made are generally low. My guess is that this idea might hold in general, anything that can be built really quickly tends not to be too impressive and all impressive things tend to take longer.
I have gotten to a point where, if I see something impressive, I have this nagging feeling, Was this completed here? or were you working on this for a decent amount of time and just took this opportunity to showcase it?
At my company, we have been looking at understanding how the beta-amyloid interacts with toxic metals in the brain that lead to formation of plaques. We have been studying the use of quantum computers for such complex reactions. Most of us come from quantum computing and quantum chemistry background, so, relatively low experience with biological aspects. And as we dug deep into the reactions and made some good progress, a few established biologists got interested and asked questions around the beta-amyloid hypothesis itself. So, I dug a little deep into the whole field, most of my information comes from the following article:
https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/faked-beta-amyloid...
After doing some independent reading, following were my big take aways:
- figuring out the truth in this area is incredibly hard. Science already suffers from social quirks like, scientists find it easy to say, 'hey, we replicated the decades-old established results and built something on top of it' rather than risk shaking the fundamentals of the field. All the big shots who did research on Alzheimer's got a lot of money from NIH for decades. Most of the projects were around beta-amyloid and these grants do not stop. So, if suddenly the field agrees that the hypothesis is incorrect, then a lot of people would lose jobs and livelihoods overnight. So, it is not just a scientific problem, the social-economic elements are quite powerful in this field.
- Another fascinating thing I learned was that at this point Alzheimer's and beta-amyloid are quite intertwined. In fact, if a patient has Alzheimer's like symptoms but does not have a high concentration of beta-amyloid plaques then, the doctors may bucket such symptoms another form of dementia, with high probability. Coming from a Physics background, I found it incredibly fascinating that we depend on some loose markers and symptoms to define such complex diseases. And as you may have noticed from some of your personal experiences, symptoms sometimes can overlap in diseases and many times not everyone experiences the same symptoms and in fact a single human may experience different symptoms from getting the same disease.
- So bottom line, not only we do not fully understand the pathophysiology of Alzheimer's, but there's a chance that we do not even understand what even is Alzheimer's.
Unfortunately, qBraid cannot help with the real-time latency. For that matter, I don't think anyone is aiming for get better latency for these calculations. The calculations that people have been focusing on, to run on a quantum computer are where quantum computers could provide a potential exponential speedup (e.g. quantum chemistry simulation, optimization problems, etc.), so, that big improvement is what people care about and none of those use cases, require low latency. In fact, IBM might be the best experience you might get anyway.
What you did was a cool experiment, but, given our current understanding of quantum computing hardware will not scale. Random number generation has to be incredibly cheap and I remember encountering a few startups in the past that used photonics to generate random numbers.
Interesting work! It is interesting how a lot of the models in physics and outside of it comes down to variations of harmonic oscillators (in this case macroscopic chiral oscillators). I am curious is the chirality gets imposed by the location and the architecture. Another interesting bit to explore would be how the agency (in my head agency is loosely defined as the number of possible actions you can take) of each individual gets contained as the crowd gets dense. If there is a way to define agency mathematically, it would be interesting to look at the correlation between agency and crowd density (my guess is inverse correlation) and then come up with strategies to increase the agency.
This is incredibly cool! If you are looking for something to do next, try replicating the following quantum game of life and may be try different rules with quantum mechnanics:
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1010.4666
quantum physicist here. I code with quantum computers (well, simulators most of the time) quite a lot.
This is a cool demo and a great first effort, but does it really use IBM's quantum computer? From my experience, the queues are generally quite long and and it takes atleast 10-15 secs from submission to getting your results back. And getting a single bit back is hugely inefficient. My guess is that you are submitting a circuit with hadamard on all the qubits with 1000-10000 shots and storing the results and showing them to people one by one? This might be misleading as you are not actually connected to the ibm quantum computer and generating random numbers in real-time.
Plus, since the ibm quantum comptuers exhibit a lot of noise, you are not getting truly random numbers. A better introduction to generating random numbers and also certifying them is available:
https://github.com/dorahacksglobal/quantum-randomness-genera...
You can play with this on qBraid.com and try out even more quantum computers. We actually used this as a hackathon challenge at South Carolina Hackathon. Keep on building and join us at future events!
This is a bad article. Probable coming from Phillip Low's own inadequacies and childhood trauma. So much stuff in there that is just factually incorrect.
"All his talk about getting to Mars to "maintain the light of consciousness" or about "free speech absolutism" is actually BS Elon knowingly feeds people to manipulate them." How do we know this for a fact, when soo many people have said the opposite 'Elon genuinely believes what he says..', plus you get to witness his good deeds in public as well. Every time there is a natural disaster or a war, he puts so many of his own resources to work (Starlink, tesla cars, SpaceX for bringing the astronauts home, etc.). The other reasons are probably the dumbest I have ever seen, it made sense for this post to get traction on X/bluesky, but on hackernews, it just seems absurd.
qBraid is rolling out access to GPUs with cuQuantum and Bloqade soon. We want to test the performance of these tools on our platform. You are more than welcome to test GPUs with machine learning workflows.
Just an FYI, the pricing for the GPUs will be highly competitive.(A100s and V100s for $2.75/hr and $2/hr respectively)
Hi Everyone,
My name is Kanav Setia, and I am a co-founder and CEO of qBraid, a quantum computing startup. If you ever wanted to easily try out running programs on quantum computers, qBraid is for you. We provide access to quantum computers from, IBM, Rigetti, IonQ, Oxford Quantum Circuits, Xanadu and QuEra. When you sign up, we provide you some free credits to get you started. We are constantly improving our platform and will be launching many more features. If you like what we are doing, please consider supporting us on producthunt. It would help us immensely. I am super happy to take any questions you may have in the comments section.