[winwang]

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.

[pclmulqdq]

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.

[winwang]

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.

[pclmulqdq]

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.

[winwang]

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).

[zX41ZdbW]

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

[typon]

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

[apognwsi]

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

[winwang]

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).