[cohomologo]

With double exponential growth, “it looks like nothing is happening, nothing is happening, and then whoops, suddenly you’re in a different world,” Neven said.

This is just a clever way to spin the fact that we are experiencing growth much slower than exponential growth now into a prediction of much faster future growth, without any evidence. Or perhaps an internal joke the physicists would make. Next time I have a really flat function, I'm going to fit it with a triple exponential like so:

  https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=plot+exp(exp(exp(x))),+x%3D-20..-5,+y%3D0..5

[glangdale]

From the article: "In December 2018, scientists at Google AI ran a calculation on Google’s best quantum processor. They were able to reproduce the computation using a regular laptop. Then in January, they ran the same test on an improved version of the quantum chip. This time they had to use a powerful desktop computer to simulate the result. By February, there were no longer any classical computers in the building that could simulate their quantum counterparts. The researchers had to request time on Google’s enormous server network to do that."

Now, yes, this article sounds bullshitty to the extreme - it's worrying the extent to which it manages to not quite get around to any technical detail except for helpfully explaining what exponential and double-exponential means. Number of qbits? Which algorithm? Who knows? Is it even an algorithm that anyone cares about ("ran a calculation").

Also, from long experience, I'm used to seeing the person with the "next big thing" (GPGPU, FPGA, custom ASIC, etc) always managing to creatively find mediocre algorithms on the CPU to compare it to.

However - even given all that skepticism - it's hard to dismiss the growth that they are rhapsodizing about as 'flat' (assuming it's real). I suppose we'll see.