[dr_dshiv]

I have a fair amount of experience in this space. It’s like, at a vacuum tube era, at best. There is a definite opportunity for advancement, but it is still extremely early.

We are building user interfaces that make it easier to “play around” with quantum computing phenomena—especially with music and art—with the idea that our aesthetic sensibilities may help drive discovery.

[oldgradstudent]

> It’s like, at a vacuum tube era, at best.

How is it even remotely close?

Vacuum tubes were a thriving industry, producing many groundbreaking products and services.

[krastanov]

I think the comparison is still reasonable: while we do not have scalable quantum computers, the technologies developed for them have actually seen a lot of use: squeezed light and non-classical light, color centers, Josephson junctions, nonlinear-optics at the single-photon level, to name a few "terms of art" that should be google-able, are crucial for precision sensing and telecom.

[fsh]

I am not aware of a single telecom application that uses any of these technologies. Could you give some examples?

[krastanov]

The nonlinear optics is what enables optical signal modulators. For modulation of classical optical signals it is not necessary to have a "strong nonlinearity at the single photon level". However, that is being developed for quantum computing applications and as a side effect it makes today's optical modulators much better.

[fsh]

Telecom signal modulators are almost exclusively based on the Kerr effect or acousto-optics. Both effects have been known for at least 100 years and have nothing to do with nonlinear optics. The development of modern modulators was always driven by telecom and then applied to scientific experiments, not the other way round.

[krastanov]

There might be some semantic misunderstanding here. "Kerr effect" is "nonlinear optics" in my book - it works both at the low GHz frequency of electro-optics and at the high THz frequencies of pure optics. I agree with the rest of your statement (and it does not seem to be in conflict with the initial comparison: vacuum tubes were being developed for 50 years due to the needs of the radio industry before they became viable for computation).

And the direction symbiotic improvements is not necessary as clear: there are academic groups solely focused on quantum optical effects, whose research then gets reused by the telecom industry and vice versa. These quantum research groups would be dead in the water if it was not for the fab capabilities initially developed by telecom folks, but they have certainly surpassed them by far now (in one-off "hero" devices).

P.S. Same with acousto-optic devices. What you would find in a quantum computing lab is far more impressive than what is being deployed today. Even if the quantum computing field is a bust, the tech they developed would improve telecom state of the art by orders of magnitude.

[lamontcg]

Right now it is a pre-transistor in the 1920s and 1930s.

Vacuum tubes are analogous to the computers that we have now. In 1925 a patent for the concept of a FET was filed. It wasn't until 1948 that we had a working transistor.

That took 23 years to go from concept to useful invention. It isn't too surprising that a quantum computer is harder.

[wikfwikf]

They are saying that quantum computing is at the stage that classical computing was at when it still relied on vacuum tubes.

Not that quantum computing is at the same stage as the vacuum tube industry was at at some unspecified time.

[denton-scratch]

It still doesn't wash. Vacuum tube computers were used in WWII to compute artillery tables. That presumably changed (or ended) lives.

I don't think it's a reasonable comparison at all.

[b112]

Yet before that stage, they were a new tech, no one even had ideas of how to use.

So far, quantum computing is used in labs, not for any real useful purpose.

[nosianu]

> Yet before that stage, they were a new tech

As far as I know - and we still had some tube radios at home when I grew up - they were used pretty much right away. For radios, and replacing mechanical relay switches, over which there obvious advantage was that since the tubes were not mechanical they would last longer, especially important in systems with lots of them.

So I'm not completely sure and somebody with definite knowledge should chime in, but I think they were not some "we have no idea what to do with this" but where useful from early on, as soon as the manufacturing method was solid. They were used for "normal" electronics well before they were used for the early computers. Even though Google search - which I just tried - also seems to have a bias and mostly associate those vacuum tubes with computers and forget all about the many other uses. It was the predecessor of diodes and transistors in addition to being better than mechanical relays.

https://www.engineering.com/story/vacuum-tubes-the-world-bef...

https://www.nps.gov/features/safr/feat0001/virtualships/vrmo...

(just one of the earliest commercial use cases as example for how short the period was between invention and wide-spread use)

> Dr. Lee deForest invented the vacuum tube in 1906. His tube, which he called the "audion," was first developed as a detector of radio waves and was quickly adopted by shipboard operators. Later experimentation, by deForest and others, showed the ability of the vacuum tube to generate radio signals with far greater precision than earlier systems. By 1914 the essentials of tube-based transmitters had been worked out.

[b112]

Sure, tube based transmitters had been, in a lab, "worked out". But we're talking about 20 years before commercial use really happened:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_radio#The_first_vac...

Radio existed (as you say) before the tube, but it took time to get the tube into real-world use. I guess this is somewhat like computing ; computing has existed in many forms, mechanical through to IC designs we have now.

But quantum? It's in a lab, and real-world applications are being worked out.

Paralleling back to radio again, people knew tubes would be useful, but it took 20+ years to make them mass producible, and make tubes usable, and redesign radios to use them. This, to me, sounds like quantum computing.

We can think of things I suppose to use them for (perhaps I was hasty on this point in my prior post), but we aren't there yet. And really, looking at the tube -- did anyone think they'd be used to make massive computers even?

I bet quantum computing will be the same way -- uses we're not aware of now.

[mdorazio]

You need to get your information from places other than Wikipedia. The vacuum tube was invented in 1904 and entered mass production by RCA in 1920 after several rounds of improvements. D-Wave started demonstrating its QC product in 2009 and here we are 13 years later with basically nothing. Are you going to tell us that QC will be commercially viable in three years?

[DubiousPusher]

It's honestly just a really bad analogy. Evacuated tubes were not pursued en-masse as an end unto themselves the way quantum computing is being pursued. Their development was as a side fascination for a handful of researchers or they were advanced because they were directly applicable to some goal of a researcher with maybe some mild tweaking. They were not a moonshot and they developed along similar lines as most useful "inventions" of today.

Quantum computing isn't even really comparable to ENIAC. Because the fundamental parts of ENIAC were known to be capable of doing what was required before the machine was built. There were analogus precursors to basically all the parts of the machine. The engineering challenges came with integration and at scale but fundamentally there wasn't a question of whether it could be done or not. We can't say the same yet of quantum computing.

IMO, quantum computing is more like space travel ca. the 1950s. We've got a lot of information: rockets look promising, we've learned a lot about the environment pilots will need to operate in up there, etc but no one really knows how far this can go and certainly we can't say if it will ever be profitable.

[aqme28]

So it's a meaningless description then of a tech's development. Somewhere between new/useless and mature/ubiquitous.

[wfn]

Could you share some links to your work / research re: interfaces with focus on art? I'd be very interested to check it out.

https://quantumdelta.nl/ is some kind of hub but landing pages offer too much hype and too little content :)

thank you.

[dr_dshiv]

I will have material to share in about a month!