DEV Community: Ean Mikale

The Death of Quantum Computing, and Why We Killed it, by Ean Mikale, JD

Ean Mikale — Mon, 25 Nov 2024 15:41:42 +0000

What may sound like a simple, sensational headline, is based on a neutrality towards cold-hard truths, even if it destroys years of our own time and efforts. The truth is that Quantum does not exist. You have not been lied to, but you have been gravely misinformed. With roughly a decade of experience in Quantum Research and Commercialization, and successful peer-reviewed research in the field, take what I am telling you with a grain of salt. Ultimately, your trajectory as an entrepreneur, a company, an engineer or developer, is a path I leave entirely to you.

In 2016, our heavily Deep-Tech firm, Infinite 8, began exploring Quantum Computing, internally producing White Papers and industry research. First, we were sweeping through all cutting-edge technologies to find real value. Our rule has always been, if the viability of the technology is more than 2-years out, we will not seek to commercialize it. Thus, we did not. However, the inefficiencies of modern Blockchain and AI applications, brought us crawling back.

Always a player in the Blockchain space, it wasn't until 2022, that we created our own Blockchain Layer from scratch, creating 'Quantum Coin', the first token in the world running on a Blockchain using actual Quantum Mechanics. Modern Blockchain networks were not providing us with the transactional speed that modern e-commerce consumers had become accustomed to. For example, when we connected our AI Physician to a prominent Blockchain for testing, transactions took 3-4 minutes to process, while credit card processing took seconds. When we moved to Quantum mechanics and algorithms, first with IBM's Qiskit, the quadratic speed-ups and added security from Quantum seemed like a God send. Then, we had no idea where our new focus would lead.

Around 2023-2024, our main focus was to Master Quantum mechanics, build an early version of a Hybrid Quantum Internet, and train Hybrid Quantum Apprentices to help with the heavy lifting. What happened next? We would discover the world's first Dark Matter particle, Particle 11, which brought changes to Computational and Physics paradigms, and one of many more particle discoveries.

Over the Summer/Fall of 2024, after breaking down roughly 150 new Dark Matter candidates and Standard Model particles down into their finest constituent parts, everything became a wave. Now, for the Death of Quantum.

By studying waves, we observed matter manifest from waves as a 'standing wave'. All of Quantum Mechanics is based on the 'Wave Function', which supposedly collapses upon measurement, making the information contained therein, unhackable. I'm here to tell you that the Wave Function, NEVER collapses, but is modulated by the observer.

A wave has a peak, a trough, and a transitional phase. When we observe an object, we transfer positive or negative energy through waves, causing the wave to transition into a modulated peak, or trough, which then appears to the observer to be stateful, when a wave is actually stateless. Also, if Wave Mechanics is the basis of Quantum, what is Quantum truly? This brings us to my next point.

A key aspect of Quantum Mechanics deals with the concept of Quantum Entanglement. Albert Einstein called it 'spooky action at a distance', as two distant entangled particles, exhibit mirrored behaviors instantaneously.

We now come for one of the key aspects of Quantum Computing today, and posit that Quantum Entanglement is an overly complicated theory, based on observations of two peaks of the same wave. Imagine a rollercoaster, where if one group of cars moves at the peak of one hill on the tracks, the other cars on the next hill will exhibit the same speed, directional movement, and behavior. There is no true disconnection between passengers on the peaks of either hill, as they are riding the same ride and are a part of the same extended wave formation. The separation is a trick of the perception of the observer, as the troughs in the wave can make one believe there is an absence of matter, energy, or existence. There is always something there.

How else does this line of thought manifest in current Quantum Computing business challenges? Instead of bits, the 0's and 1's powering modern classical computer systems we all enjoy, Qubits are artificial particles, powering Quantum Computers. The artificial particles, together, form artificial waves. The Modern Quantum Computer is a poor Wave Simulator.

Quantum computers currently under promise and underperform, because they do not have enough Qubits to create a high fidelity wave. Qubits are only an approximation of the wave. Wave Computation deals with the entire wave, similar to how Digital technology samples a signal to give us an approximation, but Analog, deals with the signal in its entirety. This also causes vinyl records, or live music, for example, to resonate in richer tones than a Digital audio recording. The same applies to Wave versus Quantum Computation, as Wave Computation can communicate the behavior of reality, seen and unseen, in all its diversity, without defining that diversity as stateful, when in fact it is stateless.

Finally, if Quantum, all along, was merely an incomplete description of the mechanics of a Wave-based Medium connecting all of existence, then why bet the house on a half-baked explanation of reality? Not only, is Quantum Computing expensive, cumbersome, and complicated, but it is outright a half-truth. The whole truth is this, if all is a wave, then Classical and Quantum Computing disappear into a larger overarching paradigm of Wave Computation, which can perform both Quantum and Classical computation, while Classical and Quantum cannot account for all Wave Computation, such as Gravitational Waves, still baffling scientists using Classical and Quantum Computational models to this day.

In conclusion, I will not lead our clients, our country, nor the world, down a dead-end path. Quantum is dead, there, I killed it. However, a wave never truly collapses, and it is so with Quantum. In its wake, lies ONE Wave, of which we are all standing wave extensions. Reality is a standing wave. As Developers and Engineers, let us make the most of our time, while we all are still standing.

Ean Mikale, JD, Principal Engineer, Infinite 8 Industries, Inc.

Our 10-Year Journey Building AI Infrastructure | I8Eco

Ean Mikale — Thu, 05 Sep 2024 15:02:40 +0000

Many of our colleagues in the enterprise and IT spaces grapple with the increasing costs of hosting data and business applications in the cloud, especially AI applications. According to a recent report published by UK cloud provider Civo, over a third of organizations surveyed reported that their cloud migrations failed to deliver on the promised cost-effectiveness. As a Technical Founder, I was uniquely positioned not only to foresee the pitfalls of full-cloud migration, but also to take action.

In 2012, I was given a book at a conference, the title of which I cannot recall. The book covered Cloud Computing and heralded the ubiquitous access to information and proliferation of cloud-based services. At the time, it was inspiring, but it wasn't until a year later that I would form a company, and it would take a few more years before we became a deep-tech organization.

Infinite 8's first foray into the cloud came through our dual efforts in Drone & AI Research and Development while also building our first commercial application. In 2014, as I was teaching myself to code with limited knowledge of IT infrastructure, we began with a truly Hybrid Infrastructure. We used powerful simulations that blended Drone hardware-in-the-loop with cloud-based AI technologies. Yet, our first app was built entirely in the cloud, using IBM's BlueMix and specifically a third-party vendor, Mendix.

Through IBM's Global Entrepreneur Program, we were granted $15,000 in cloud credits. However, once our app was about 80% complete and our credits began to run out, we realized that continuing our cloud journey would cost between $1,000 and $2,500 per month—an unsustainable expense for a bootstrapping startup. As a result, we released Dronetrepreneur as a web application without the need for third-party services.

While this web application discovery was useful, two key developments changed our trajectory. First, we were introduced to Linux, and second, we discovered that IBM's Watson was running on Nvidia server architecture. We transitioned to dual-boot systems, running both Windows and Linux, systems which also incorporated Nvidia GPUs. This shift enabled us to build applications and train our AI models locally, avoiding prohibitive cloud costs.

Still, we found this setup insufficient, leading us to abandon Windows and cloud architecture entirely by 2018. We invested in gaming computers and a high-end GPU cluster to extend our infrastructure, enabling us to build AI models and run compute-intensive simulations. However, even with this more powerful hardware, simulations were still bottle-necked, and AI training continued to take days.

This led us to explore Quantum Computing, in 2018, dedicating staff full-time to this emerging vertical. By that time, we had become proficient in programming drones and autonomous vehicles on resource-constrained embedded devices, prioritizing code security and optimization. Our goal was always to develop applications for deployment on physical machines with limited power and memory footprints. We concluded that Quantum Computing was the only way to scale Artificial Intelligence effectively. As early as 2017, we realized that a Quantum Network was essential to run AI applications and advanced simulations. Anything less would introduce too much latency and too many security vulnerabilities for real-time systems such as self-driving cars and drones operating in dense urban environments.

It took half a decade for Infinite 8 to realize its vision of a Quantum Network, which became InfiNET. Our recent project running on InfiNET, ONEAI, is the fulfillment of that vision. We chose a hybrid cloud setup, utilizing local and on-premise infrastructure primarily, with cloud services via API as a secondary option for high-end applications where increased costs are justified. This approach has delivered increased energy efficiency, faster processing and data transfers, enhanced security, and local control, providing us with a scalable architecture that feels limitless. Today, we run InfiNET and ONEAI on clusters of less expensive Nvidia Jetson GPUs locally, with cloud API access to Superconducting and Annealing Quantum Computers.

Now, many companies are facing the same challenges in scaling AI infrastructure, much like we did in 2015. Should you build in the cloud, outside the cloud, or adopt a hybrid approach? The answer depends on the business case, the organization's resources, and a long-term commitment to AI development and commercialization. Fortune 500 companies, global governments, hedge funds, mutual funds, and family offices are beginning to realize what we did years ago—AI is power-hungry, and it needs Quantum. Whether it takes a decade for smaller and midsize firms to reach this same conclusion remains to be seen. But make no mistake: Quantum is coming to save the data center, and it will be integrated into our lives, often without us even realizing it (e.g., GPS, MRI machines).

Wherever you are on your cloud infrastructure journey, Infinite 8 has been there. Together, we can solve these challenges and better serve our customers and the environment in an increasingly technological world. We wish you the best of luck on your cloud infrastructure journey. - Ean Mikale, JD, Founder, Infinite 8 Ecosystem | www.infinite8industries.com