Microsoft quantum breakthrough claims labeled 'unreliable' and 'essentially fraudulent' Microsoft's claim of a quantum computing breakthrough has attracted strong criticism from scientists, though the software giant says its work is sound – and it will soon reveal data that proves it. Redmond’s quantum claims were made in February when it announced its in-house boffins had created "the world’s first topoconductor …
...between a number of eminent scientists, and a big sh*tbag corporation who are hiding their claimed evidence, and whose premier product is a bug addled, data-grabbing, overly ambitious and perennialy under achieving operating system. Hmmm, it's difficult this one.
Perhaps it's just Microsoft getting in early to establish the next snake-oil to support their share price when the AI bubble goes "pop".
Add in the Trump tariff shenanigans and maybe it's time to finaly wholesale remove that unproductive and seriously unsecure cancer from IT.
Nah, we can but dream. It would be so good if we put a tariff on Microsoft. And on the few Tesla's that are still sold, of course. 100% seems fair for the latter.
How's that cold fusion doing?
It's being packaged with room temperature superconductors, this Majorana† topoconductor and a good lashing of AI.
† Ettore Majorana had interesting political affiliations not unlike those of our King DoGE.
and that medical report that he promised back in 2016....
The man is full of lies. He probably does not know a real truth (not a post on Troth Cental) if it hit him in the face.
MS is the same. Peddling lies.
Windows was once great.... Now? it is something to avoid, like that Tesla stock that keeps crashing just like their self driving cars.
Maybe the microsmurfs are simply trolling their bosses, because they are bored and have nothing better to do than smoke pot and publish bullshit papers while the pointy-haired bosses try to decide whether to fire the whole company and replace it with "AI".
... Or maybe that has already happened and this is the result
Removing my bias hat this is tricky.
How do you prove you have done something that has never been done? How do you design a test to prove something that has never been done? You also have to do that without giving away fully how you actually did it.
I'm no rocket surgeon but I can see both sides of the coin here. I think the solution would be to have standard ranges on the tests to remove ambiguity. Let's say on the off chance Microsoft are this far ahead we do need to know because from my very limited understanding it will change everything in computing and beyond.
It's difficult to not obfuscate something which is already obfuscated.
"Legg thinks that older paper is “the basis for all of these [new] claims” but that the two pieces of research use different measurement ranges for reasons that isn’t explained in Microsoft’s latest research."
and
"They had the definition of topological and then they adjusted it,"
Even with that unless you have a defined range or method for what it is you are testing then you can't really prove anything either way. It looks like bullshit but they don't know it's bullshit.
I always thought the scientific community didn't get into these tit-for-tat squabbles. Publish a paper, it gets peer reviewed then you know the outcome. I'm pretty sure the peer review can say there isn't enough information to validate what the paper is saying. If Microsoft make claims outside of this then just leave them to it and let them look like fools of themselves once it's peer reviewed. After that no one will take them seriously though a previous paper being invalidated does not automatically equal the current one being invalid.
Careful. Peer-review is only the beginning, and it means the paper sort of meets the standards and is not completely bonkers (ok, and the claims seem to be supported and those things). Then it is published. This is where we are now in the process.
What comes now is scrutiny by those scientists that did not review the paper. Are the arguments convincing? Is the methodology clear? Does the whole shite make sense??? This is the discussion that has now started.
What is the real test is having those results reproduced by an independent research group. We will see. I would currently bet against that. Two reasons: I think that extraordinary claims overthrowing a current paradigma are often... wrong, and secondy I would be too excited to worry I lost a bet if the results are actually correct. Like the "faster-than-light" paper 15 years ago, which (to be fair) was actually asking the question "what have we missed" and not the hyped up POS media made it out to be - and it turned out to be... I forgot, wrong calibration of the time stamps or the wrong distance, or something like that. So no faster-than-light neutrinos.
I feel that the big two journals (Nature and Science - there's no science in Nature and no nature in Science, as the saying goes) mostly want papers that make a big splash. That's also why those are journals with a higher than average retraction rate. Controversial papers generate discussion and citations, making the journals appear more important than they are. Don't read that stuff, just publish there...
“the big two journals…..Science and Nature”
Perhaps I have just worked in the wrong fields, but I don’t think any field/sub-field has either of those journals as its “journal of record”. They’re more for splash-publishing to the wider science/public/journalism world. They are properly peer-reviewed and the papers are sensibly written, not Pop Sci, but it’s not where the “real work” is done. Every sub-field has its own premier journal, and the famous two just can’t be that.
I’ve also noticed that over the years, there is in fact a rather high % of fraudulent stuff there which has had to be retracted. Partly because OMG Breakthrough features heavily, and such stuff turns out to be fraud nearly as often as not, because incentives. Sign of the times.
I seem to recall that the ones my old man used to read (Ph.D. in Physics, head of a US university Physics dept. for some 30 years) were Physics Review, and perhaps Scientific American. (this was a while ago, and the names are a bit fuzzy, but there it is...)
If you got published there, you had something.
I am not a physicist at all, but experimental science is broadly concerned with tests to prove something that has never been done before. It is certainly difficult, and choosing the right tests and criteria is hard. In many instances though it will be obvious that certain specific criteria need to be proven to a high confidence, but these criteria are only obvious to other experts in the field. You are right that those of us who are outside the field are not likely to be able to evaluate the claims, but I think skepticism by independent, reputable scientists in the field is a bad sign. Standard ranges on tests often proves to be impossible due to the non-standard nature of cutting edge science, but we do often have bare minimum criteria you should need to establish within a field. The 'how' of establishing those for your particular study is still a huge question.
For what it is worth (not much), based on my limited time as an academic, I do think this matches a common 'BS' architecture: a widely publicized paper in a journal like Nature where a group claims to be not just one step ahead but many. In my field it was often "New earliest signs of life" or else "X isotope signature disproves Y commonly accepted paleoclimate conditions". When I was reading lots of papers, these would usually be immediately and obviously pretty deficient.
As Carl Sagan popularized: "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.'
ou also have to do that without giving away fully how you actually did it.
The problem is, you have to tell the boffins how you did it, in order to have it verified that you actually did it. Yeah, intellectual property and all that tommyrot. That's what NDAs are for. And if you are planning to patent this, you will need to spill the beans there. So their reticence adds to the already thick stench of Horse exhaust.
I have been following Majorana fermion claims for quite a while, and I have yet to see convincing evidence. As I understand it, the Majorana fermion is more properly considered a quantum state than a fundamental particle (though I may be wrong, it is years since I took my courses in quantum mechanics), and this adds to the confusion. As the Majorana fermion is considered to be neutral and its own anti-"particle", I am given to wonder if it doesn't self annihilate easily. Whether or not it exists at all, it is certainly elusive, and the jury is still very much out on this one. The evidence will have to be pretty solid before such a huge claim can be believed.
I will follow this saga as it unfolds.
One can argue that, strictly speaking, these are not fermions but quasiparticles with fermion-like properties.
Microsoft's management may be a bunch of unprincipled moneygrubbers, but their boffins do occasionally get something right.
Mine's the Maple Syrup flavour.
The wave function of a particle and its anti-particle are complex conjugates of each other, so it a Majorana fermion is its own anti-particle then it can only be real. If is real then it is exists.
This is known as proof through grammatical misunderstanding.
Much like Elon Musk and DOGE then? They make all sorts of wild claims about finding 'Waste, Fraud and Abuse' yet show us very little in the way of real data.
Counting a project canned in 2008 and had all its bills settled is not real 'Waste....'.
Come on MS, stop with the hype.... Show us the real data so that your claims can be independently verified. Peer Review and all that stuff.
Otherwise, go away and die.
That disorderly ZBPs could challenge MZMs into breaking stringent TGPs for shallow InAs quantum well hosted 2DEGs, in tuned two-sided tetrons and proximitized nanowire models, is huge! The Rashba spin-orbit Hamiltonian might never fully recover ...
... as a result, the CNOT may remain strong, but the lattice surgery could lose its toplogical quintescence (or not?). It's just like the fundamental difference between a mohawk (2-D), and dreadlocks (2+1D), imho -- both highly fashionable, but not quite the same thing (iiuc)!
is that I really do not understand quantum mechanics.
Beer simply won't do it - I need Whisky.
A Majorana particle is a theoretical particle that is its own anti-particle. A Topological Q-bit is where the topological properties of the 'particle' do the 'quantum mechanical' parts, or something ...
To be really confused try:
https://quantum.microsoft.com/en-us/insights/education/concepts/topological-qubits#:~:text=Topological%20qubits%20are%20theorized%20to,of%20individual%20particles%20or%20atoms.
Oh, and yes, I did do a course on topology at Uni, even did a project where I showed that the chord theorem only applies to path-connected sets of points and constructed a set that was connected but not path-connected to show it did not satisfy the chord theorem. But with all this quantum mechnicalness topologilisationing I am perplexed.
The chord theorem states that in a path-connected set, if there are two points A and B in the set a distance a apart, then there are also two points, X and Y in the set such that the chord from X to Y is parallel to the chord AB and the length of the chord XY is a /n or a(1 - 1/n) for any natural number n. (I think, cannot find it now.). SO, there will always be points X and Y such that the chord XY is parallel to AB and XY is a /2 .
I was going to call bull on this when the news first came out, particularly as it emanated from Microsoft who can't even make conventional computers work properly. But I couldn't be bothered making yet another anti quantum nonsense post, what with all the grief I get from the believers of magic fairy dust unicorns.
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