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Government United States

Two Quantum Computing Bills Are Coming To Congress (gizmodo.com) 76

Posted by BeauHD from the new-space-race dept.
Quantum computing has made it to the United States Congress. "Quantum computing is the next technological frontier that will change the world, and we cannot afford to fall behind," said Senator Kamala Harris (D-California) in a statement passed to Gizmodo. "We must act now to address the challenges we face in the development of this technology -- our future depends on it." From the report: The bill introduced by Harris in the Senate focuses on defense, calling for the creation of a consortium of researchers selected by the Chief of Naval Research and the Director of the Army Research Laboratory. The consortium would award grants, assist with research, and facilitate partnerships between the members. Another, yet-to-be-introduced bill, seen in draft form by Gizmodo, calls for a 10-year National Quantum Initiative Program to set goals and priorities for quantum computing in the US; invest in the technology; and partner with academia and industry. An office within the Department of Energy would coordinate the program. Another group would include members from the National Science Foundation, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, the Department of Energy, the office of the Director of National Intelligence to coordinate research and education activity between agencies. Furthermore, the draft bill calls for the establishment of up to five Quantum Information Science research centers, as well as two multidisciplinary National Centers for Quantum Research and Education.
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Two Quantum Computing Bills Are Coming To Congress More

Two Quantum Computing Bills Are Coming To Congress

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  • I thought the free market was magically supposed to provide all the innovation we needed?
    • spending money on Basic Research is perfectly consistent with the Democratic Party's platform.

    • Google, Microsoft, and Lockheed are all going to have useful quantum computers by next year. This is just the government pretending that they were involved.

  • Sure, nobody could so far put up any evidence that Quantum Computing will ever be able to be more efficient than conventional computing, but hey, let's allocate billions to the belief in the hype.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      AFAIK, your post is complete nonsense. It is perfectly well known for which tasks quantum computing will be more efficient than conventional computing and how many functioning Qbits you need (with given error rates). Note that the computational power does not increase linearly when doubling qbits. Apart from the tasks that we know can be solved, there is an ever expanding list of research results of more tasks that quantum computers are suitable for. You have to think of a quantum computer like a giant and

      • >It is perfectly well known for which tasks quantum computing will be more efficient than conventional computing

        But as the poster you rudely accused of posting nonsense wrote, it's never been demonstrated.

        There are legitimate reasons to think it will never happen: Noise, cost scaling of maintaining low entropy space, incompatibility between quantum error correction on qbits and doing logic on those qbits.

        I'm a sceptic. I don't expect to see the ECDLP for deployed key sizes solved by quantum computers, ev

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by HiThere ( 15173 )

        Actually, it's not that clear. Certain quantum processes have been applied successfully on reasonably large scale to Quantum Computing, but they aren't (or don't seem) sufficient to build a general quantum computer, but only a specialized variety that can handle some problems well, but can't touch others.

        Other techniques have been shown to work in the lab, but getting the error rates under control has been quite a challenge, and nobody has proven that they can do this in a stable fashion.

        Even then, for man

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by mysidia ( 191772 )

        It is perfectly well known for which tasks quantum computing will be more efficient than conventional computing

        False. They're not actually known to be more efficient. Today we can already build a quantum computer in the form of software simulators that stand on top of normal hardware. If quantum computation was truly inherently more efficient ---- then we could just a quantum algorithm rnning on top of the software simulator as our more-efficient implementation.

        Quantum computers might turn out not

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Quantum computers can break some modern crypto. For example, RSA is based on the unproven assumption that factoring is a "hard" problem. We already know that it's not a hard problem for quantum computers. RSA is toast with quantum computing and it's not the only one. It's not about efficiency. It's about completing the totalitarian panopticon, and it's scary shit.

    • it's when you research something that's not immediately profitable but might be some day. Most of the time it doesn't pan out and when it does it takes decades. But you wouldn't be typing this on a computer if it didn't sometimes pan out because we wouldn't have microprocessors.
    • The recipients of the billions in funding will look like a 'who's who' list of congressional donors.

    • Hey, better idea: let's allocate billions to mass surveillance, economic wars and derailing 3rd world states instead!

    • This really isn't accurate. Cold Fusion didn't correspond to how we understood how basic physics worked, and had substantial problems with claims being made that could not be replicated. Quantum computing in contrast has an extremely well-developed theory behind it; the primary issues of getting it to work are engineering, not physics. In that regard, quantum computing is very close to trying to develop practical conventional fusion technology: we're pretty sure in principle it can be done, but the engineer

  • QC has failed to actually work for too long (Score:3)

    by gweihir ( 88907 ) on Saturday June 09, 2018 @07:06AM (#56754772)

    That basically means it is a dud. There have been countless others before. This one just ghosts around a bit longer, because it sounds a bit like "magic" and people without an actual grasp of Science like that.

    • The ghost of Marvin Minsky says: "Come join me."

    • See here [wikipedia.org]. For an entirely new field of study that touches on particle physics that's not bad. Not everything has to turn a profit right the f now. If we ran things like that it would take centuries to get anything major done, which is exactly what was going on for the first several thousand years of human history.

      If we can afford to spend $21 million on a single bomb to drop on Afghanistan to inaugurate President Trump [newyorker.com] we can spend some money on basic research.

      • If we can afford to spend $21 million on a single bomb to drop on Afghanistan to inaugurate President Trump [newyorker.com] we can spend some money on basic research

        If voluntary donors can spend a billion dollars in a failed attempt to get a corrupt senator elected president of the United States, then voluntary donors can spend some money on basic research; no need to forcibly extract the money from taxpayers.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by novakyu ( 636495 )

        Um, where do you think a lot of basic research money comes from? NSF funding is tiny [aaas.org] compared to what DOD spends. That MOAB funded a lot of basic science researchers.

  • Gosh, if only someone had thought of this before. Creating a sort of Defense Agency to oversee Research Project Administration.
    Imagine the innovations that could be unleashed! We could call it DARPA. Oh, waitaminute.
    Hey Kamala! The 60's are calling, and they want their idea back

  • If it doesn't put the coal miners back to work it isn't going to go anywhere. #MAGA!

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Tablizer ( 95088 )

      If it doesn't put the coal miners back to work it isn't going to go anywhere.

      Maybe they'll invent Schrodinger's Canary.

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AHuxley ( 892839 )
      Quantum will allow China to talk to its embassies without the NSA and GCHQ getting the usual realtime plaintext.
      France will use Quantum codes to direct its embassy staff to sell French bridge building and car exports to poor nations.
      Poor nations will be flooded with exported French cars and be in debt for billions after accepting French engineering projects.
      Something the NSA, CIA and MI6 have always been able to prevent France from doing in the past.
      Quantum will allow the French government to bid for

    • Will the US be able to pay for these initiatives by printing quantum money?

      Other US senators politely referred to the text of Harris' bills as 'superdense coding'.

      Repeated measurements of Senator Harris in the Congressional eigenbasis always collapse to the |Democrat> state.

    • ' Increasing Entanglement Between Military and Industrial Complexes'

    • ... will be referred to the new Schrodinger Committee where they can remain both live and dead while unobserved.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by AHuxley ( 892839 )
        The NSA can use the quantum to pay for new codes that are both in plain text for the USA to read in real time and 100% unbreakable to a China. At the same time.

  • Who should be allowed to do it and who should not. As if the bad guys will give a rat's ass about your silly laws. On the other hand, it's possible that the NSA is already ahead of private industry in QC and these bills are just a move to drag commercial development down into a giant bureaucratic clusterfuck.

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • Kamala should add cold fusion to the bill too, because we really need alternative energy! That's how progressives create progress: they write a bill, pour hundreds of billions of money into the hands of corporations, and then magically progress happens! Just look at history, it's how the automobile, the integrated circuit, the telephone, the light bulb, the laser printer, and digital cameras were created! Progressive science policy FTW!

    • Just look at history, it's how the automobile, the integrated circuit, the telephone, the light bulb, the laser printer, and digital cameras were created! Progressive science policy FTW!Or, you could look at how the Internet, manned space flight, the interstate highway system and nuclear energy were created, you stupid sonofabitch.

      • Good grief, man, are you schizophrenic? As a free market guy, I at least recognize each of those items for the colossal waste of government spending that they are and for the massive negative consequences that they had. But you often argue against the consequences of those programs, yet simultaneously you still like the spending? Progressives and leftists: "all government spending is good, but crony capitalism and subsidies of things we morally disapprove of are bad!"

  • Suppose you were an idiot, and suppose you were a member of Congress but I repeat myself.
    Mark Twain

  • If you're going to be competitive on the World Stage with Quantum Computing, Artificial Intelligence, and the like, you're first going to have to solve your education problem.

    The country that will win this race has already figured out that they need a highly educated population to get there.

    Period.

    You don't get there by putting entire generations into debt so deep that they drown in it before their lives even get started.
    You don't get there with the piss-poor system we have in place today where only the ric

  • Congress to take up bill regulating perpetual motion.

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