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Comment by winwang | Hacker News Reader

Skimmed the litepaper. Has the flavor of: you can do "simulated" annealing by literally annealing. I like the idea of using raw physics as a "hardware" accelerator, i.e. analog computing. fwiw, quantum computing can be seen as a form of analog computing.

I do think that a "better rng" can be interesting and useful in and of itself.

Thanks for the Normal Computing post, it felt more substantial.

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I make a better RNG right now (https://arbitrand.com).

We experimented with doing ML training with it, but it's not clear that it trains any better than a non-broken PRNG. It might be fun to feed the output into stable diffusion and see how cool the pictures are, though.

Cloud RNG number streaming is interesting but costly, no? I did have the idea to serve truly random numbers via a quantum computer (trivial by just preparing the simplest state and measuring). Anything else can't be said to be truly random.

You don't need a quantum computer to sample noise from quantum processes.

It's a prohibitively expensive way to go, and depending on how you built the quantum computer, it may be more susceptible to interference and non-quantum noise than using good circuits and custom systems.

Oh sure, it was more of a joke app idea, or in another sense, for those who want philosophically "perfect" randomness. After all, assuming a single bit sample, anything but a hadamard state has nonoptimal entropy. Of course, it makes almost no sense to sample a bit at a time since we want pragmatism. But having a virtual coin flip essentially "create" a new, nonexistent bit of information in the universe -- that's funny (well, assuming certain interpretations of QM).

The website has a picture https://arbitrand.com/fpga.png but it is difficult to understand what it represents. Needs clarification.

That looks like the placement of their circuit on the FPGA. Like a screenshot from ChipPlanner in Quartus

with error correction, qc is entirely distinct from analog computing. that is what makes it even remotely viable, theoretically.

I'm using the term "analog computing" to mean using non-digital (or even digital but in a nonstandard way). A quantum processor is not digital as each qubit has an uncountable number of states. A quantum computer would likely have a classical (digital) part to measure the quantum processor's registers, which are a bunch of "analog" states. And even if one wants to use terminology in a way that qc isn't analog, it would still objectively share many qualities with "normal" analog computing (basically all of its differentiators against classical compute).

Then again, I should probably also ask what you mean by "analog computing", and why you think quantum error correction would not allow qc to be classified as analog.

For context, I did research on crafting a high-fidelity (error-correcting) quantum gate (successfully).

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