back to article 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 …

  1. Like a badger

    Faced with a choice here

    ...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".

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Faced with a choice here

      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.

    2. collinsl Silver badge

      Re: Faced with a choice here

      I'd argue that Windows is a sideline to MS now, their real premier product is Azure, followed by M365.

      1. Anonymous Coward Silver badge
        Windows

        Re: Faced with a choice here

        Don't you mean copilot?

        1. collinsl Silver badge

          Re: Faced with a choice here

          Yes, yes I do. M365 Copilot. That mess.

      2. ecofeco Silver badge

        Re: Faced with a choice here

        You would be correct.

        Windows future roadmap is to be just a thin client.

    3. Someone Else Silver badge

      Re: Faced with a choice here

      So, Micros~1 pumping and dumping unrelenting (and unverifiable) marketing hype. Shirley, etc.

  2. Neil Barnes Silver badge

    In other news...

    How's that cold fusion doing?

    Caveat: I am not a physicist; I don't even play one on TV.

    1. Bebu sa Ware
      Coat

      Re: In other news...

      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.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: In other news...

        "the software giant says it’s work is sound – and it will soon reveal data that proves it."

        Don't forget Donald Trump's tax returns and the location of Jimmy Hoffa.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Don't forget Donald Trump's tax

          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.

    2. Zippy´s Sausage Factory
      Joke

      Re: In other news...

      I dunno... Adobe owns it now I think? Haven't touched it since the Allaire days... runs away

    3. JimmyPage
      Boffin

      Re: Cold fusion

      Don't be so quick to scoff.

      Cold fusion can be achieved if you can find a way to reduce the Coulomb Barrier between atoms. There are a few ways in theory that this can be done.

      1. mcswell

        Re: Cold fusion

        "Not unless you can alter time, speed up the harvest or teleport me off this rock." --Luke Skywalker

  3. original_rwg
    Facepalm

    I kept reading Majorana as Marijuana....

    I'm off for a lie down...

    1. Dizzy Dwarf

      And an entire pack of Jaffa Cakes.

    2. cyberdemon Silver badge
      Devil

      Not the only one wondering WTF MS are smoking

      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

    3. Someone Else Silver badge

      Marjoram?

      Margarine?

      Migraine?

      You decide.

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    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.

    1. ChoHag Silver badge

      > How do you prove you have done something that has never been done?

      Openly, not hiding behind a guy fawkes mask data obfuscation.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        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.

        1. Joe W Silver badge

          Only the beginning...

          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...

          1. Justthefacts Silver badge

            Re: Only the beginning...

            “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.

            1. Someone Else Silver badge

              Re: Only the beginning...

              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.

          2. MrAptronym

            Re: Only the beginning...

            Such a good point about Science and Nature. That is where the splashiest papers in most fields go. A single Science or Nature paper should never convince anyone of anything lol

          3. Anonymous Coward
            Anonymous Coward

            Re: Only the beginning...

            Thanks for the correction. I thought peer review was looking at it and replicating.

    2. MrAptronym

      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.'

      1. Andrew Scott Bronze badge

        should be agnostic. weight equally for prove, disprove or no definitive results.

    3. steelpillow Silver badge
      Joke

      I'm no rocket surgeon

      You don't need to be. This is brain science.

    4. Someone Else Silver badge

      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.

  5. Kane
    Boffin

    ...but the software giant says it’s work is sound...

    It's true! Copilot told us so!

  6. Mentat74
    Trollface

    'unreliable' and 'essentially fraudulent'

    So... just like Windows 11 then...

    1. seven of five Silver badge

      Re: 'unreliable' and 'essentially fraudulent'

      Nope, "malvolent" is missing.

      1. Andrew Scott Bronze badge

        Re: 'unreliable' and 'essentially fraudulent'

        mendacious missing also.

  7. Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge

    Popcorn may be required

    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.

    1. steelpillow Silver badge

      Re: Popcorn may be required

      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.

  8. cookiecutter
    FAIL

    Linkedin influencers deleting like crazy

    As ever the tech press and normal press are so desperate for news they'll just pump out any old shite that the PR teams puke out to get a "story"

    Watch the number of "THIS IS AWESOME!!!" Posts on linkedin being deleted.

  9. IanRS

    Majorana particles exist, really!

    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.

    1. Joe W Silver badge
      Pint

      Re: Majorana particles exist, really!

      Have one--->

      (or two...)

      Middle-of-the-week is over, from now on it's downhill...

    2. ecofeco Silver badge
      Headmaster

      Re: Majorana particles exist, really!

      But the symmetry of curricular reasoning begging the question is so elegant!

      (do I need the /s tag? Oh right. Modern times)

    3. steelpillow Silver badge
      Coat

      Re: Majorana particles exist, really!

      A complex argument that, involving as it does imaginary numbers.

      Microsoft are clearly imagining things.

      1. Fruit and Nutcase Silver badge

        Re: Majorana particles exist, really!

        Copilot hallucinating?

        1. steelpillow Silver badge
          Joke

          Re: Majorana particles exist, really!

          Hallucinatory numbers, now that could be the Next Big Thing!

          All transcendental numbers are hallucinatory. Discuss.

  10. Steve Davies 3 Silver badge

    More hot air (aka marketing lies) from Redmond

    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.

  11. tmTM

    Silicon Valley Science

    You can't fake it till you make it with such public facing Scientific projects, especially if you're going to present data. It either is, or it isn't.

    Ask Elizabeth Holmes how it will end up.

  12. excperr

    Majoranna 1

    Majoranna1

    Majorannal

    Major Anal

    1. dmesg

      Majora~1

  13. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

    "has even more impressive results to share soon"

    As soon as it opens the box to find out what they are.

    1. steelpillow Silver badge

      But will they be alive or dead?

      1. Fruit and Nutcase Silver badge

        Both. Zombies

        1. steelpillow Silver badge
          Coat

          Well, that collapses my argument.

  14. HuBo Silver badge
    Gimp

    Still love it!

    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)!

    1. Someone Else Silver badge

      Re: Still love it!

      OK, who are you, and what have you done with amanfromars1?

  15. ecofeco Silver badge
    Facepalm

    Vaporware? M$?

    Shocked I tell you!

    A company with a track record like M$, telling lies?

    Unpossible!!!

  16. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    MS claims scientists biased against them

    A Microsoft spokesman claimed that "all scientists the world over are biased against Microsoft because they hate our Office and Windows products". Oh wait...

  17. LateAgain

    Microsoft have had quantum computers for decades

    As in: will it come back after this update reboot?

    Schrödinger predated home computing that's why he used a cat in the thought experiment.

  18. anonymous boring coward Silver badge

    Is it April 1st already?

    1. ecofeco Silver badge

      Dammit. Made me look.

  19. frankvw Bronze badge
    Facepalm

    Gasp!

    So... What you're saying is that... Microsoft is better at marketing bluff than at... developing actual technology???

    No... Surely not....

    I am shocked, SHOCKED! Who'd have thunk it? Who could possibly have seen that coming?

    <cough>

  20. boblongii

    Doesn't matter

    Even if they had done what they claimed - which I doubt - they have no idea how to solve the cooling problem. Keeping TWO bits at 0.15°K is tricky enough and requires a lot of power; they'll never be able to scale it, economically or otherwise.

  21. Eclectic Man Silver badge
    Boffin

    All this proves

    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 .

  22. Someone Else Silver badge

    Legg’s beef with Microsoft is that the mega-corp relies on tests that don’t work.

    So, Micros~1 reusing their Teams testing approach*, then. How quaint!

    *Something about a tiger, and stripes...

  23. JulieM Silver badge

    One Time Pads

    Quantum computing techniques are useless against a One Time Pad, because every possible plaintext is equally likely to produce a given ciphertext.

    1. Eclectic Man Silver badge
      Coat

      Re: One Time Pads

      What? You mean, there's no 'gubbermint back door'?

      The horror!

      Get my coat, please, it's got an HB pencil and a spiral-bound paper notebook in the pocket.

  24. druck Silver badge

    Damn

    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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