Hacker News Reader

Comment by thoughtsimple | Hacker News Reader

The title of the article is "Physicists in China challenge Google's 'quantum advantage'. And the article does refute Google's claims of quantum advantage with references.

"But some quantum researchers contested the claim, on the grounds that a better classical algorithm that would outperform the quantum one could exist3. And researchers at IBM claimed that its classical supercomputers could in principle already run existing algorithms to do the same calculations in 2.5 days."

I'm not sure what you would change the title to. This one seems to accurately describe the article.

View on HN

I think the issue is that the word "challenge" has two common usages in English:

1. to engage in competition

2. to dispute the truth or validity of

And the article uses the word in both senses -- the headline is that Chinese physicists are challenging Google in the first sense. But the article body mentions that other researchers have challenged the Google result in the second sense. Overall, it seems like a confusing choice of words by whoever wrote the headline.

Excellent!

Clearly "in China" is missing, though your other points are correct.

Is there some reason why the origin of the experiment is relevant?

Titles shouldn't be editorialised without good reason, as per the guidelines. It's no more than that.

The Chinese experiment is rather well known so I think it being in the title gives good context to the reader.

Ironically, this article is from December third, so the Chinese experiment being well known is only because past articles like this!

For starters Chinese researchers lie differently to how Western researchers lie.

Secondly it's exciting to see countries around the world do cutting edge research, like Japan bringing back the Ryugu samples.

Thirdly it's HN rules to copy the original article title.

Fourthly "Physicists challenge Google’s ‘quantum advantage’" implies the profession of Physicists are saying Google’s ‘quantum advantage’ is incorrect or something.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com