Researchers Created 'Quantum Artificial Life' For the First Time (vice.com) 55
From a report: For the first time, an international team of researchers has used a quantum computer to create artificial life -- a simulation of living organisms that scientists can use to understand life at the level of whole populations all the way down to cellular interactions. With the quantum computer, individual living organisms represented at a microscopic level with superconducting qubits were made to "mate," interact with their environment, and "die" to model some of the major factors that influence evolution. The new research, published in Scientific Reports on Thursday, is a breakthrough that may eventually help answer the question of whether the origin of life can be explained by quantum mechanics, a theory of physics that describes the universe in terms of the interactions between subatomic particles. Modeling quantum artificial life is a new approach to one of the most vexing questions in science: How does life emerge from inert matter, such as the "primordial soup" of organic molecules that once existed on Earth?
And all *this* with 5 qubits? (Score:4, Funny)
Incredible! :)
When I poo in the woods (Score:2)
I call it cranking a steamer. The steam is strong on this one. I think there are more chaotic fluctuations in the poo steam than 5 cubits could model. And my life is profoundly influences by the beauty of that steam. I really don't think they can model life.
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yes I know conway, Did you have a point here? it's eluding me.
Great, more Quantum Bullshit! (Score:3, Insightful)
Seriously, this is getting utterly ridiculous and not in any funny sense. That whole "quantum computing" thing is nonsense, get over it. And stop to find "new" applications that nobody needs and that work better on a classical computer anyways.
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If quantum computers worked as D-Wave advertised, they would be great, but so would perpetual motion machines and snake oil.
FTFY
Quantum computing is in its infancy. Everyone (except Geordie Rose, presumably) knows that all we have right are proof-of-concept toys which don't solve any problem any better than well-tuned classical solvers, and also that we probably won't any time soon.
Nonetheless, it's in the nature of the tech industry to overestimate the short-term impact of a new technology and underestimate its long-term impact. Snake oil was a patent medicine, but so were aspirin, Vicks Vapo Rub, and tonic water.
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Quantum computing is in its infancy.
After 40 years of intense research? I don't think so. It is a dud. Whether it dies by not scaling or by not actually delivering the operations it promises to is immaterial in the end (for computing). Although the 2nd possibility may have interesting implications for Physics.
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After 40 years of intense research?
Just like fusion power, yes.
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Fusion power is different. They do have real advances and they have the issue that their machines take decades to build.
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Quantum computing is in its infancy.
After 40 years of intense research? I don't think so. It is a dud.
Not necessarily. What happens is that all the easy problems have already been solved. In a number of fields, making further progress has become exponentially more difficult for a while now. Theoretical physics has been mostly stagnant for the last 40 years in part because of that. As far as quantum computing is concerned, 90% of the donkey work is already done. The remaining 10% will take 90% of the total time - assuming that it is doable.
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So you predict we have the whole thing (if possible) in 400 years or so? Makes sense to me.
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"Snake oil was a patent medicine, but so were aspirin, Vicks ..." ... and don't forget Coca-Cola with real cocaine
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All you need to know is author information:
Basque Centre for Climate Change (BC3), 48940, Leioa, Spain
Department of Physics, Shanghai University, 200444, Shanghai, China
Those two universities have had more "research" retracted than the rest combined.
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Publish or perish. Beats getting a real job though.
As opposed to produce or perish?
A university researcher's job is just as "real" as anyone else's. There are deadlines, budgets, evaluations, deliverables, conferences, reports, meetings, and so on.
It's not easy to get a job doing university research. The pay is low compared to industry. People do it for the love of knowledge more than for the money.
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Quantum blockchain AI even.
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As far as I can see, one class of problems where quantum computers can be useful, if they can be gotten to work, is in cracking encryption. Encryption can be, and is, crafted such that conventional deterministic solutions take impractical amounts of time. In principle, quantum computers can crack such encryption quite quickly. Testing to see if the quantum solution is correct -- it won't always be due to "leakage" of the correct answer out of the system -- is trivial. If you don't get a good answer, you
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Not even that. For block-ciphers, a working QC halves the key-length. That means AES-256 is not breakable with a QC in this universe and even AES-128 may be secure due to the extreme effort needed. That is for a known-plaintext attack. For things like RSA, you need to be able to put in the whole problem in one go. That means a huge number of entangled qbits, which may just be infeasible.
So no, I doubt even this use-case will materialize.
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You need to add some more terms (Score:4, Funny)
like blockchain and bookface integration and self-driving to get enough words for BS Bingo, /s
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Conway's game of life. Yep. That was my first thought also. Not that getting a quantum computer to play CGL wouldn't be a remarkable achievement. But not, I think, one that would provide much insight into the origin of life.
(Why would anyone think that the origin of life has, much less requires, a quantum explanation?)
Our story so far (Score:4, Insightful)
This...is technobabble.
Insofar as life started by bootstrapping from inanimate complex molecules, it isn't a difficult concept, and requires discrete units of atoms and molecules with real properties.
There's nothing directly quantum required as life is all about chemistry at a very gross scale above the quantum.
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My opinion also. The early Earth apparently had liquid water although it's unclear quite how since the sun was, in principle, quite dim back then. There are numerous known mechanisms for producing organic compounds if there is nothing around to eat them. Presumably self replicating organic compounds will eventually appear by pure chance if a complex organic soup sits around long enough. And life as we know it eventually evolved.
The details are quite hazy and seem likely to remain hazy for decades or may
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I mostly agree that the article is technobabble (we've known about dynamic programming for a long time, and there's nothing quantum about it). Cells are indeed just a mass of molecules arranged in a certain way so that they can perform reactions and reproduce.
However, I think that some of those chemical reactions are helped by quantum effects (I vaguely remember that mitochondria, in particular, due to their geometric configuration, "use" quantum effects to speed up their energy production beyond normal che
Quantum artificial life (Score:2)
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Congratulations, I bet that was hard eh?
Except that each cell is alive, dead, or both.
They should create... (Score:2)
Miller Urey Experiment (Score:2)
Astounding what gets published in Science nowadays (Score:2)
This was done with five noisy qubits. Everything that such a chip can do can be simulated at much higher quality on classical machines. Five quibits you could even simulate on your cell phone.
I am running a start-up that is exploring what kind of use you can get out of near term noisy quantum computers (50 qubits and beyond).
BS hype like this is not helping.