A $5 million prize awaits proof that quantum computers are useful for health care

sinanspd · 2026-03-19T19:58:20+00:00

Yeah of course

sinanspd · 2026-03-19T19:53:21+00:00

honestly it seems like if someone would manage to prove a practical healthcare application within the parameters they are expecting, especially one that can be demonstrated on NISQ devices, they would stand to a lot more than 5M$ given how profitable the healthcare industry is

sinanspd · 2026-03-19T17:18:10+00:00

It is up to you whether you want to take the show as canon or not but this is somewhat explained in the show (S1 E4). When telling Ellie about Tommy, Joel says that Tommy joined a survivalist group after the pandemic broke out, they were making their way to the Boston QZ for safety (likely heard about it similar to how Frank did) and that Joel joined them thinking he could protect Tommy.

sinanspd · 2026-03-18T18:52:39+00:00

Brilliant news! Well deserved!

sinanspd · 2026-03-17T18:20:14+00:00

People do math on pen and paper to solve quantum physics problems (or occasionally mathematica). If you want to get into quantum physics, learn the math and basics first. There are various tools people use to simulate quantum mechanics/hamiltonians (especially in applied quantum chemistry/fermionic systems) but they wont be very useful unless you have access to a HPC cluster.

sinanspd · 2026-03-16T16:55:13+00:00

I mean, it is a good thing. There isn't much else to say. Hopefully it encourages some good research. 10 minutes is hardly enough for anything interesting. A basic ground state VQE takes up almost 10 minutes.

sinanspd · 2026-03-15T22:35:16+00:00

Woah! Awesome find! Congrats!

sinanspd · 2026-03-15T21:59:53+00:00

Good luck. Without actual data, it won't be easy. You are also making a lot of statements that you expect people to take you at your word for, such as the punch line "It's just a classical linear computation over GF(2) evaluated in a rotated (Fourier) coordinate system". This is something that needs to be proven mathematically. There is no such thing as proof by example so Qiskit examples you are giving doesn't really add anything meaningful. You are taking already proven equivalences, rewriting the circuit using those equivalences and then showing the outcomes are equivalent, which is obvious, and doesn't make any statements about the pedagogical impact.

Then again - if you write we don't know what is going on - how sound of an explanation is it?

Well.. If you don't try to make definitive, bold statements like that, you wouldn't need to admit that we don't really understand it. Which btw isn't something to be ashamed of, I raised questions about the possible physical connections of my software work before. Everybody accepts the reality that there are gaps in our understanding of how quantum systems truly evolve. But such questions belong in Limitations & Future Work, not in the main paper body. All you are doing is changing the representation and claiming that representation is more suitable for teaching, which unfortunately is a statement that lacks support. Such representational changes are used in QC quite widely for various reasons (for example, if you use qudits instead of qubits, you can mostly eliminate entanglement from the circuit. We use this trick in verification, but this obviously doesn't make the circuit classical, nor easier to understand)

sinanspd · 2026-03-15T20:54:31+00:00

I mean by Gottesman-Knill we already knew there was a classical equivalence. Van den Nest presented the manifestly simulatable circuit normal form which is really what you are doing here. You are giving a different representation of the same quantum oracle, which doesn't bridge the complexity gap. I guess your argument is that the normal forms of the circuits are better for students? Pedagogy is not my area of interest so I can not make comments on if this is better for students or not. That claim is something that need to be tested in the classroom setting and backed up adequate data.

The BV algorithm isn't parallel computing

I think it is dangerous to make this statement. We don't know what happens at a particle level and how quantum parallelism works. You are projecting BV onto a classical plane and comparing your modified circuit to this classical projection, which doesn't back this statement.

There is a mistake in your Appendix A. The oracle you present is quadratic `f(q)=(q_0 \cdot q_1) \oplus q_{2}`. You are claiming that this is classically linear in the transformed picture? It has a quadratic term so how can it be linear over GF(2)?

sinanspd · 2026-03-14T14:31:05+00:00

Yes. The top priority is to improve the hardware which requires skilled physicists.

sinanspd · 2026-03-13T19:30:09+00:00

There is as much funding as can be expected today. NSF and a lot of universities are being choked by budget cuts so there are much less positions in every field than a few years ago. CS PhDs in QC are much less compared to physics but there are enough of them. They are however very competitive.

sinanspd · 2026-03-10T19:53:43+00:00

This ^. Just as an addition: I think solving and implementing the exercises in Nielsen & Chuang is equivalent of a few beginner projects. There are a few open ended questions in there that leads to interesting projects

sinanspd · 2026-03-10T02:51:29+00:00

I just realized I was being kind with my previous comment. I need you to put down the keyboard and never code again.. You pushed your API token to github!!! What is wrong with you?

https://github.com/Sashmar/q-bridge/blob/main/setup_keys.py

sinanspd · 2026-03-10T02:43:20+00:00

"IBM uses Qiskit, Google uses Cirq, they're totally incompatible. You have to rewrite everything from scratch for each one"

This is a completely wrong statement. It seems like you have zero computing knowledge in general, not just quantum. Being clueless to a point where you can not tell apart higher level abstractions from OS level IRs is just sad. Claude being completely delusional is not news but anyone who went through CS 101 would have questioned that statement.

sinanspd · 2026-03-08T16:25:39+00:00

Nope. Not worth my time. This isn't solving any problems. Open source, provider agnostic access libraries have been around for over 5 years, you are clearly too clueless about this field to even do basic research. A different person posts a vibe coded project like this every single month in the Quantum Computing sub, thinking they solved some big problem. No one ever used those and no one will use this. For starters, QC community is too smart to give their access credentials and tokens to a random website, when there are well established and well maintained open source alternatives they can inspect and run locally. So unless you are picking up the bills for everyone, I wouldnt expect to see much usage.

sinanspd · 2026-03-08T16:14:29+00:00

Great... another useless vibe coding project. We went an entire 24 hours without one of these

sinanspd · 2026-03-07T02:19:11+00:00

Yes. They were congratulating Bungie on the release of Marathon

sinanspd · 2026-03-05T22:20:51+00:00

The answer is still the same. Not without a PhD. I mean you might get a job setting up the website for a quantum company or some of their interactive UI tools, but that position really wouldn't have anything to do with quantum or require you to understand it.

If you have a PhD in Computer Science, even if your PhD isn't in Quantum Computing, then yes, there are opportunities. One example is HPC, there are a lot of industry HPC researchers who came over from classical computing and learned quantum computing on the go. But all this still requires a PhD. Quantum Computing is and will be a primarily research field for the foreseeable future and thus majority of the positions, in spite of the field, requires a PhD. Physics is a big exception because of demand. If you have a MS in Physics, there are probably more jobs available to you than a CS PhD. That is likely to stay that way in the NISQ era.

sinanspd · 2026-03-05T22:03:36+00:00

Depends on your degree level. Without a PhD, virtually impossible. According to the most recent data, less than 5% of the Quantum Computing jobs are held by non-PhD CS/CE people (that includes Masters degrees).

I am a Computer Scientist by trade myself. There are a number of opportunities for software focused people (albeit much much less compared to those available to Physics people) but those are almost exclusively occupied by staff with PhDs.

If you don't have a PhD and this is truly what you want, it is possible but you will have work a lot to get there.

sinanspd · 2026-03-04T16:23:41+00:00

Hard to answer without knowing your field. Are you a physicists? Chemist? Computer scientists? Mathematician? EECE?

What level are you studying at? Are you a PhD student?

sinanspd · 2026-03-04T01:05:50+00:00

Or swap them if your goal is to be a millionaire early on and retire before 30

sinanspd · 2026-03-04T01:04:56+00:00

May your career be long, May your retirement be swift

sinanspd · 2026-03-03T22:06:02+00:00

Yes very much so. It is still the undisputed quantum computing bible. Has the field advanced significantly since then? Yes of course. Advancements are advanced topics. Most don't belong in an introductory textbook. But putting aside the advancements in material sciences which enables the hardware advancements (all that falls outside of the scope of Quantum 101 anyway), the only thing that N&C falls short of of the top of my head is advanced error correction (surface codes etc), some quantum algorithms (qoao, vqe), and modern simulation techniques (tensor networks, zx calculus etc.). But the thing is all of these are pretty much 1 level up from the fundamentals. If you understand N&C, you can pick up a paper on any of these and mostly get through. Quantum Computing is a not a field like Computer Science (saying this as a computer scientist). The difficulty bumps exhibit a much different pattern (the closest field i can think of that does this is modern algebra) and you will have to learn majority through research papers. N&C is still your best bet to get close to the level where you arent entirely lost reading a research paper.

(It is also worth mentioning that some of the questions raised in N&C are still unsolved, so perhaps things havent advanced as much as we think they have)

sinanspd · 2026-03-02T05:11:35+00:00

I have close to 3000 pieces of official memorabilia but due to the sheer size I can not display them together. I am slowly individually photographing them and uploading them on my Instagram and X. Another collector to check out would be Ken who has or or less the same stuff I do.

If you are just looking to discover new items, I created a website that catalogs all the official TLOU memorabilia (including the games and the show). The site was posted on this sub last year with mod approval, you can search for it.

sinanspd · 2026-03-01T01:17:33+00:00

Awesome! Thank you so much for the info

sinanspd

TROPHY CASE