Joe Fitzsimons
@jfitzsimons
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Physicist. Founder and CEO @horizon_quantum . Former @quantumlah PI and associate professor. Slowly drifting south-east (Dublin-Oxford-Singapore).
Singapore
Joined July 2009
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Very excited to show off our IDE Triple Alpha as we move towards early access.
- BASIC-like and assembly-like quantum programming
- Turing complete (goodbye circuits!)
- Quantum subroutines from C/C++ (!!!)
- Supports ~ any instruction set
- Run once, deploy or resource count
We are excited to present the early build of the system that we were developing.
Here is the first video of our integrated development environment, Triple Alpha, showing how you can program at different levels of abstraction with our programming languages, Helium and Hydrogen.
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Guys, we need to stop this nonsense. Yes, some people go overboard on hype, but the anti-hype backlash is equally as wrong.
A thread born out of frustration on misconceptions about quantum industry👇(1/n)
(it's gotten so bad I've been driven to emojis!)
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As a physicist, you realise pretty quickly that you're unlikely to win a Nobel Prize, but I've always secretly hoped that someone I've worked with would. Today they did. Enormous congratulations to Anton Zeilinger. I hope everyone at
@iqoqivienna
and
@univienna
are partying hard.
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I was asked recently to give predictions for QC in 2023. Here's what I said:
1. Death of NISQ
2. Further progress on fault-tolerance
3. Trouble for PQC
4. Clearer understanding of quantum advantage
Four days into the year, and
#4
seems to be coming true:
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How strongly do I believe quantum computing has a bright future? Strongly enough that I’ve just resigned from a tenured faculty position to be chief executive at
@horizon_quantum
.
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As Austria, France and the US add one to their Nobel laureate tally, I hope there are people celebrating in Belfast too. Bell may not still be with us, but his finger prints are all over this year’s prize and his theorem will live on forever.
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My twitter feed is full of negative takes on the
@TIME
quantum computing cover story, but I must admit that I was excited to see it and view it as something of a milestone in terms of QC entering the public consciousness.
So here’s a thread in defence of quantum optimism. (1/n)
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Was a bit surprised to see this paper being cited in a bibliometric analysis of quantum machine learning. It doesn’t have many citations, mostly because it doesn’t exist.
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Physicists don’t quote other physicists to physicists. It’s the correctness of the argument that matters, not who first said it, but somehow both Hollywood and crackpots get this wrong. It’s a bit painful seeing it in 3 Body Problem.
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I thought I had a new joke about physics, but it’s been known in Russia since the 1970s.
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It's a big day for us today at Horizon, as we announce our latest funding round, led by
@Sequoia_India
.
Today, we announce our seed financing increase to SGD 4.5 m (USD 3.23 m) thanks to a seed-plus round led by
@Sequoia_India
with participation from previous investors
@SGInnovate
, Abies Ventures,
@DCVC
, Qubit Protocol, Summer Capital and Posa CV.
#QuantumComputing
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I'm listening to Valley of Genius on audiobook (after seeing a tweet about it by
@DynamicWebPaige
), and it is really adding to my conviction that the being part of the quantum computing community is about as close as you can come today to reliving the early days of computing.
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It's just turned midnight in Singapore, so it's now Christmas. But Santa brought my present early: a link between superconducting qubits and optical photons: .
Can't wait for the day we can run blind quantum computing protocols on superconducting hardware.
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Delighted to be able to share that Horizon has raised a little over US$18m in Series A financing.
Horizon Quantum Computing raises USD 18.1 million Series A investment from Sequoia Capital India, Tencent, SGInnovate, Pappas Capital and Expeditions Fund.
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Just got a letter saying that I have been granted tenure and appointed to Associate Professor. I should probably be more excited. I could really use a break.
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Jill Biden’s thesis has typos? Mine has a chapter based on a flawed theorem, yet I don’t hear anyone complaining about ‘Dr’ being on my business cards.
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MIP* = RE!
Although I've worked on this problem a fair bit, and I've seen progress happening, I thought it would turn out to be one of those complexity theory questions that might take 100 years to answer. Massive congratulations to all involved.
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I’m embarrassed to admit that I’ve made it to associate professor without understanding why the maths textbooks used in first year always have grandiose titles (“Advanced Mathematics” etc) whereas texts with a PhD prerequisite use “Elementary” and “Introduction to” as prefixes.
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Hit a bit of a citation milestone today. My blind quantum computing paper with
@KashefiElham
and
@annebroadbent
just got its 500th citation. It only got 2 in its first year, so don't lose heart if your papers aren't met with immediate adulation.
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We’ll have a bunch of quantum and non quantum openings coming up. If you want to work on on hard and ambitious projects that include both developing new quantum trickery and actually implementing it, drop me a line either by DM or to careers
@horizonquantum
.com.
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Finally finished building my Christmas present from my wife.
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Big announcement from IBM: 53 qubits available next month. Congrats to all involved.
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If you’re a QC researcher who was expecting to take up a position in the US but now can’t (or don’t want to) because of the new visa restrictions, we have a number of spots opening up
@horizon_quantum
in Singapore.
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Planning on having a quantum computing chat on Clubhouse on Wednesday morning at 10am SGT (Tuesday 6pm Pacific). First time trying out organising one of these. The more quantum people the merrier. I have a few more invites, so ping me if you’re a quantum person and want to join.
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If you’re following quantum computing developments, I strongly recommend Earl’s observations from QEC. Despite talk of quantum winter, we’re at the start of a golden age for error-correction and fault tolerance. Now is the best time to be in QC that has ever been.
I collected my post-
#qec23
thoughts and blogged them. Happy reading and thanks
@BartlettQuantum
for putting on such a great event :)
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It turns out that it’s possible to have taught mathematical methods at an Oxford college and still be unable to help your wife with her 6th grade math lesson plan because you don’t understand the weird nomenclature used in the problem sheet.
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I’m amused that people seem surprised when I say that QC isn’t useful yet. Surely we can all agree on where things currently stand, even if we disagree on future trajectory. If I cared more about information theory, I’d be like an optimistic version of
@quantum_graeme
.
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Forget ground state hardness, quantum computers can efficiently simulate what chemists do in the lab.
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Just opened the BBC news app and am shocked to see some nonsense about oil at the top, rather than the real news of the day: Martinis left Google! At least
@WIRED
have their priorities straight.
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When I first got in to quantum computing, I thought it would be cool if someone I knew went on to win a Nobel prize. It never occurred to me that a bunch of friends and colleagues would someday win an Ig Nobel Prize. Congrats to all involved!
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If you work on quantum computing, it's worth noting that the Atari 2600 had 128 bytes of ram (1024 bits) and had a 1.19MHz CPU. Sounds like this year's QPU announcements.
Yes, I know, error rates make all the difference, but quite a milestone nonetheless.
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In 2018 (or maybe 2019), when I was first setting up
@horizon_quantum
, a former colleague told me that anyone who said that there would ever be a quantum computer with more than 100 qubits was a liar. Maybe something worth keeping in mind when judging progress in the field.
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Excited to announce that we will be opening a new office in Dublin.
We are delighted to announce that Horizon Quantum Computing is expanding to Europe with a new office in Ireland. The expansion is part of Horizon’s growth plan to leverage skilled quantum computing and software engineering talent in the region.
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It seems that we have entered a very interesting phase in the development of quantum computing, and we may need to look beyond purely academic research to push the technology forward. Today I registered a company: Horizon Quantum Computing (
@horizon_quantum
).
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I’ll be speaking at
@rigetti
Advantage 2020 on Monday (and in SF over the weekend). I’ve packed some of our new t-shirts. Come find me if you want one.
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I have been quiet on the Google results, because frankly they don't deserve to be robbed of the chance to publish in Science or Nature. But since the cat is now pretty much out of the bag, huge congratulations to all involved. This is Colossus, not a difference engine.
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@preskill
@dabacon
@michael_nielsen
@ATabarrok
My CV from now on will consist of just a screenshot of that tweet.
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Thanks everyone who came to chat on clubhouse earlier for the quantum meetup. Given that we now have a better idea of audience, I’d like to solicit topics for future meetups. Next week,I propose focusing on QC startups: what are people building and what has the journey been like.
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Get to strike a few things off the old start-up bucket list today.
1. Start a company (ok, this was a while ago).
2. Have Sequoia as an investor.
3. Read an article about said company in TechCrunch.
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Apparently we're getting a new internet, and I couldn't be more excited. These days, I tend to draw historical parallels between quantum computing and the early days of conventional computing, and it's hard not the read the US blueprint as quantum ARPANET.
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Delighted this is finally out. It languished on the arXiv too long, but the PRA version is significantly improved. GP regression seems a concrete ML problem where you can avoid or overcome all of Scott’s “small print” caveats for HHL based algorithms.
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Last year I did some predictions for quantum computing in 2023. I think these have held up pretty well, and I was planning on doing the same for 2024. Unfortunately, all of my '24 predictions came true in the last two weeks.
I was asked recently to give predictions for QC in 2023. Here's what I said:
1. Death of NISQ
2. Further progress on fault-tolerance
3. Trouble for PQC
4. Clearer understanding of quantum advantage
Four days into the year, and
#4
seems to be coming true:
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188
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"But is there really a market for quantum computing ..."
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I’ve been listening to a lot of audiobooks recently while working (shared office!), and have been binging on stuff about early computing. If you are working on QC or quantum comms, I can thoroughly recommend ��The Soul of a New Machine” and “Where Wizards Stay Up Late”.
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Just saw Tenet. I suspect many people doing QIP will like it. Probably just should have been called “†”.
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Getting ready to hang some
@horizon_quantum
posters in my office. The SQuID-squid is my favourite.
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People often speak of the serendipity enabled by being in Silicon Valley, but I had never experienced it. But today, walking along a street in Palo Alto, I heard someone calling my name, and turned round to see Terry Rudolph and Joseph Emerson and ended up joining them for lunch.
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If you work on quantum computing, happen to be passing through the Bay Area at any point, and want to feel really good about what your work, go visit the Computer History Museum (
@ComputerHistory
). It really reinforces the feeling that we are reliving the early days of computing.
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Quantum computing seems to be undergoing a phase change. This year I have more invitations to speak at tech conferences than at academic conferences. But don't worry, I just integrated sin(x) to cos(x) on the board in front of a bunch of students, so I'm staying grounded.
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Apparently you can tweet your way into Nature, and it's a lot easier than constructing the entangled multi-prover interactive proof result the article is about:
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I gave a remote talk earlier this week for
@UTS_QSI
. The video is now up on YouTube. It is probably the most complete talk I have given so far on our work at
@horizon_quantum
and includes everything from Q2B and Rigetti Advantage.
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Facebook just reminded me that exactly fifteen years ago today Anne Broadbent, Elham Kashefi and I each won $5 from Scott Aaronson and Seth Lloyd for blind quantum computing, and that I was feeling quite smug about it. Still am.
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It’s also weird that they think physicists would be crushed to see results inconsistent with current theory being replicated around the world. What physicists actually see is Nobel prizes being handed out like Oprah giving away cars.
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What’s the point of not having a boss if it means you don’t occasionally spout controversial opinions?
“If we focus purely on the hardware development, we're going to get to a point where we have hardware and that hardware has no applications. That's as much danger of causing quantum winter as us not getting the hardware.” -
@jfitzsimons
at
#QTML2021
.
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Not the first time Horizon has been on the news, but it's the first time in Ireland. Seeing a company you've put years into building talked about on TV (for positive, or at least non-negative, reasons) doesn't get old.
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It’s pretty hard to imagine how you could have a quantum computing startup without the widespread adoption of arxiv preprints that has occurred in the field. I’m definitely prepared to trade journal peer-review processes and copy editing for completely open access.
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We've been organising a series of panel discussions on the barriers to useful quantum computing. The first episode focuses on hardware and is out today as a podcast (), with guests Chris Monroe (of $IONQ/
@IonQ_Inc
) and John Morton (of
@quantum_motion
).
We're launching
#QuantumWell
: a series of discussions with scientists putting their energy into tunnelling through the barriers to useful quantum computing.
Ep 1 on Hardware and Architectures, with Chris Monroe (
@IonQ_Inc
) and
@DrJohnMorton
(
@quantum_motion
), is available now.
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It's a news day for us today. Horizon will be participating as a node on Singapore's new national quantum communications network. For us, this is an important step on the path to ensuring that users can not only code through us, but also securely deploy quantum applications.
Horizon is to become a node on the National Quantum-Safe Network, announced by the National Research Foundation, Singapore, and
@NUSingapore
.
We commit to supporting research over the network that could build the foundations for a future quantum internet.
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I had a joke about physics publishing, but Reviewer 2 said it wasn’t suitable for Twitter’s broad readership and that I should try a more specialised publication.
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As we approach a new low-noise era for quantum computing, tight integration between hardware and software will be critical to making the technology not just useful but indispensable. I'm delighted to share that we are establishing our own hardware testbed at
@horizon_quantum
.
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Delighted to have been part of the launch of the Trinity Quantum Alliance earlier today. Great step forwards in building up a quantum computing ecosystem in Ireland.
Horizon joins the newly launched Trinity Quantum Alliance (TQA) as a founding partner. A collaboration between
@tcddublin
,
@Microsoftirl
,
@IBMUKI
, Horizon,
@AlgorithmiqLtd
and
@MoodysAnalytics
, TQA is established to create vibrant quantum ecosystem in Ireland.
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@quantumVerd
@decodoku
@cronycle
@preskill
@MSFTQuantum
@QuantumIQC
@AndreasAtETH
@jaygambetta
@andrewmchilds
@rigetti
@Yale_QI
@qiskit
@jenseisert
Quantum influencers aren't a thing. That's what's so amusing about these lists. It's not like Bluefors call you up and offer you a dil fridge if you'll tweet about them. Twitter is just a place to mildly embarrass yourself in front of colleagues for the sake of closer community.
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Will quantum twitter please stop over-reacting and saying HHL is dead. It isn't. The paper causing all of this is focused on low-rank matrices, not the sparse matrices addressed in HHL.
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So, if anyone is out there wondering how they can relive the glory days or be part of the next revolution, come work on quantum computing. QC needs engineers just as much as it needs scientists, and exciting developments are happening every day.
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Huge congratulations to
@Nana__Liu
. She has just taken up an Assistant Professorship in Shanghai Jiao Tong after two years with us as a postdoc.
Congrats to CQT's
@RBedington
and our alumnus
@Nana__Liu
on being named
@techreview
#InnovatorsUnder35
for Asia Pacific 2019! He works on
#quantum
satellites and she works on
#quantum
computing.
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Controversial opinion: There is a significant chance that BQP contains the intersection of NP and co-NP, and as a result there may be no secure post-quantum public-key cryptography.
Please quote tweet this with your most controversial quantum information opinion.
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I’m definitely not cool enough for Berlin. Showed up at a restaurant for dinner and I think I just asked the DJ about my reservation.
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Just seen a panel of seven VC asked the currently most overhyped and underhyped technologies: 1 vote for quantum as most overhyped, 2 for quantum as most underhyped. Pretty consistent with my view that it is both overhyped and underhyped at the same time.
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"In the early days of Fairchild, it was considered a major breakthrough to surpass 100 stored bits of data on a single chip." - The Big Score by Michael S. Malone.
Something worth remembering when considering the status of quantum computing today.
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Tried to explain to a journalist earlier the difference between theorists and experimentalists by saying I wasn't the kind of physicist that had a screwdriver in my office, only to realise that I did in fact have a screwdriver in the office.
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Next week’s Midweek Quantum Meetup will be on quantum computing startups (and will be a lot more focused than this week). Same bat time, same bat place.
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I decided to write something on QRAM to try to scratch that itch once and for all:
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It's depressing to see
#layoffs
trending, but not all tech companies are cutting jobs. At
@horizon_quantum
we have 25 openings to fill in the near future, across science, engineering, product and design. Roles mostly in Singapore or Dublin.
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16
34
Getting ready for Christmas in Singapore. I really hate not being in Ireland for Christmas, but staying put seems like the responsible thing this year. My siblings sent us a hamper from Ireland so we have a taste of home and have
@christmasfm
going in the background.
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A whopping 9 quantum papers accepted to STOC 2019 by my count:
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As a professional physicist, I have access to all sorts of computer algebra systems and high performance computing, and yet somehow I still have the log tables from my Leaving Cert (state exams when finishing secondary school) in my office. I have no explanation for this fact.
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Delighted to join the jury. In a sign of how small the QC world is, the 8 person jury also includes a co-author (Elham Kashefi), two former colleagues (Troy Lee and Iordanis Kerenidis, both via
@quantumlah
) and a former boss (Michele Mosca via
@QuantumIQC
).
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2
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Seeing this video of atoms dancing to implement gates from Lukin's recent paper was my "It speaks!" moment.
A fascinating conv0 with
@jfitzsimons
on the future of
#quantum
and he reminded me of this sublime scene on "seeing the face of god" in the best show on early days of the silicon valley. it feels surreal that we get to live this again with
#quantum
:)
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@QuantumDaily
@QuantinuumQC
@cambridgecqc
Quantum computers won’t break modern encryption in 2 years unless there is currently a secret fault-tolerant QC we don’t know about.
@Marco_Piani
’s annual report on the timeline for cryptographic threats is by far the best synthesis of expert opinion available on the subject.
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2
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Ok, new prediction: getting to fault tolerance just became a race.
I was asked recently to give predictions for QC in 2023. Here's what I said:
1. Death of NISQ
2. Further progress on fault-tolerance
3. Trouble for PQC
4. Clearer understanding of quantum advantage
Four days into the year, and
#4
seems to be coming true:
10
33
188
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0
33
Congratulations to
@sihuitan
, our chief scientist at
@horizon_quantum
, on being named to Singapore Computer Society's 100 Women in Tech list.
Glancing through the list I see a few familiar names, including Yvonne Gao who was previously part of our team.
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0
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The
@SimonsInstitute
has a nice article on the path to MIP*=RE. Amused that the piece starts with Thomas Vidick preparing for a lecture that led to our QMA_EXP in MIP* paper. I remember feeling guilty that it was the only paper I wrote during my visit.
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1
34
Pro tip: when someone asks you about the timeline to fault-tolerant quantum computers, you could do a lot worse than to point them to Michele Mosca and
@Marco_Piani
's annual report on the quantum threat timeline. The 2021 version can be found here:
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Question for twitter: what PhD students are doing the most interesting work in quantum computing at the moment?
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1
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Great thread on how quantum computing hardware is progressing. It’s probably not at all surprising that I share Earl’s perspective on how things were in our PhD days, since we were sitting about 6 feet apart most of that time.
My two cents on the twitterati debate of whether qubit quality has not been increasing (fast enough?) because of the focus on qubit count.
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Just booked my flight to NYC for Inside Quantum Technology’s November event. First trip out of Singapore since Rigetti Advantage 2020, right before the pandemic hit. Can’t wait.
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Just a reminder that we're doing a quantum computing startups chat on clubhouse at 6pm PST on Tuesday (10am SGT on Wed.). If you're planning on joining and you're in a QC startup and want to speak, please ping me so that I can have an idea of who's coming.
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Cat qubits seem to be looking better and better by the day. Latest claim: 2 minute bit-flip protection in a superconducting system. We'll have to wait for the paper for caveats, but isn't that an improvement of 10^11 over the first superconducting qubits?
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Delighted that our startup
@horizon_quantum
will be partnering with
@rigetti
. Our friends (and former colleagues) at
@EntropicaLabs
are also partnering with them. So 2 out of 12 launch partners for the Quantum Cloud Services are Singaporean companies. Not bad for a small island.
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4
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Happy New Year everyone! I’m more excited than ever to see what advances in quantum computing this new year will bring. Yes, useful quantum computing hasn’t yet arrived, but there is real progress being made on multiple fronts.
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If you’re a quantum physicist, you should watch Oppenheimer. I have no time for the Oppenheimer-envy that so many in AI seem to be experiencing. The parable of Oppenheimer for physicists is about the weight of the work of those that went before. It’s our Iron Ring.
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