What The Heck Is a Qubit?

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Joe
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Re: What The Heck Is a Qubit?

Post by Joe »

Sik wrote:Today I learned that INT32_MAX is prime o_o
So is INT8_MAX, INT64_MAX, and INT128_MAX. These convenient numbers are Mersenne primes.
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thefox
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Re: What The Heck Is a Qubit?

Post by thefox »

Joe wrote:
Sik wrote:Today I learned that INT32_MAX is prime o_o
So is INT8_MAX, INT64_MAX, and INT128_MAX. These convenient numbers are Mersenne primes.
Doesn't seem to be true for INT64_MAX: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=is+2%5E63-1+prime

Others are correct, though.
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Re: What The Heck Is a Qubit?

Post by tepples »

If x is composite, 2x - 1 is also composite. And 63 = 3 * 3 * 7.
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Punch
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Re: What The Heck Is a Qubit?

Post by Punch »

I'd better learn how to make bread or fix a car, because there's no way I will be able to wrap my mind around this once real quantum computers are viable. :cry:
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Drew Sebastino
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Re: What The Heck Is a Qubit?

Post by Drew Sebastino »

Luckily for me, I already have some mechanical knowledge. :lol:
Joe
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Re: What The Heck Is a Qubit?

Post by Joe »

thefox wrote:Doesn't seem to be true for INT64_MAX:
...And that's what I get for posting when I'm supposed to be asleep. :lol:
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Re: What The Heck Is a Qubit?

Post by Sik »

Punch wrote:I'd better learn how to make bread or fix a car, because there's no way I will be able to wrap my mind around this once real quantum computers are viable. :cry:
By the time quantum computers are viable, automation will have already taken care of that stuff as well =P
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Drew Sebastino
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Re: What The Heck Is a Qubit?

Post by Drew Sebastino »

I don't know why fast food restaurants haven't automated preparing food more, especially with people demanding a higher minimum wage. It costs a lot of money initially, but it'll pay for itself in time. I think I heard McDonalds wants to put in kiosks for ordering, so that's a step forward.
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Re: What The Heck Is a Qubit?

Post by rainwarrior »

Espozo wrote:I don't know why fast food restaurants haven't automated preparing food more, especially with people demanding a higher minimum wage. It costs a lot of money initially, but it'll pay for itself in time. I think I heard McDonalds wants to put in kiosks for ordering, so that's a step forward.
It's kind of a question of reliability.

The kind of machine that can make a good looking burger costs a lot to make, but also a lot to maintain. The more complicated and subtle a machine is, the more often it's going to break down, and I'm sure the cost of a qualified technician and repair is going to easily be 1000x higher than the cost of the employee you have to hire to replace it while it's on the fritz.

Why doesn't McDonalds cook your food with robots? Probably because the kind of burger a reliable machine would make is a pretty sorry looking thing. ;P It'd be disgusting to their customers, who would stop coming back.


I've seen automated kiosks for ordering in Burger King and at Jack in the Box, but they didn't last too long at either place. I think generally the user experience has been to reject this kind of thing. Probably it can be implemented well (e.g. pizza delivery via website order form seems to work great), but I think most of the times it's been tried in fast food it's failed.
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Re: What The Heck Is a Qubit?

Post by lidnariq »

Espozo wrote:I don't know why fast food restaurants haven't automated preparing food more, especially with people demanding a higher minimum wage. It costs a lot of money initially, but it'll pay for itself in time.
For now, I can't really quite believe it's anything more than a threat against metropolitan areas that have voted in favor of higher minimum wages.

If it were actually worth doing, the difference between paying for a ~$30k robot (and a service contract) shouldn't matter much whether you're paying humans a minimum wages of ~$18k/year or ~$30k/year.
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rainwarrior
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Re: What The Heck Is a Qubit?

Post by rainwarrior »

FWIW they do automate lots of steps in the making of fast food. Particularly this applies to the supply chain that gathers and prepares the ingredients, and processes them into the components that go into the food.

Fast food is "fast" because they're mostly just assembling stuff from ready made parts, and performing the last stage of cooking/heating.

I've worked on assembly lines making food products. Generally companies automate whatever they can. Some stuff can be done easily by machines, and some stuff it's just more practical to hire a human to do.

It might change in the future as automation technology improves, but I doubt that buying a robot today to replace current uses of human labour will be cost effective in the long run. I'm pretty sure it's been thoroughly considered in cases like this (e.g. McDonalds certainly has). All of the machines have maintenance costs. They have to meet some target volume of reliability before they're worth replacing a human with.
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Drew Sebastino
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Re: What The Heck Is a Qubit?

Post by Drew Sebastino »

rainwarrior wrote:It's kind of a question of reliability.
Oh, I kind of forgot about that detail...

Never mind? :lol:
lidnariq wrote:If it were actually worth doing, the difference between paying for a ~$30k robot (and a service contract) shouldn't matter much whether you're paying humans a minimum wages of ~$18k/year or ~$30k/year.
Well, one's a single payment while the other is every year. Maintenance can't cost as much as the whole thing.
rainwarrior wrote:The kind of machine
I wasn't thinking anything near as complex as that, well, I mean no single piece of machinery would be that complex, but there'd be a lot more of it. Everything would be running on a computer together that is directly licked to the kiosks. I was thinking you would have a couple of wheeled or treaded "tables" that would move around, and there would be specialized mechanical arms (they don't need to have anything like fingers or the range of flexibility that robot had, if it works the grill, all it needs is something like a spatula) that would take a burger off the table robot and put it on the grill. When it's done, another robot would come back to carry it. There would be QR codes that tell the robot where to be, and when it reaches the destination, it would send a signal to the main computer that would go to the machine at the station it is supposed to be at. If it doesn't get there, it would send out a signal to whatever human workers are there to fix it. The main computer would have to multitask all of this to ensure that everything is done as fast as possible. The main problem I see with this is keeping the robot carrying the food sanitary (I'm not even sure how regular fast food workers do this. They'd have to at least touch the bun of a burger, and I doubt they change there gloves every burger) and mostly, having the things at each station work. For example, how would you get a robot to fish pickles out of a jar and place them on a sandwich without falling off, and if they did, how would it know? You'd have to add a bunch of sensors and fancy AI that would drive up the price.

Yeah, the more and more I think of this, the dumber and dumber it sounds. :?

I wouldn't be surprised if this did happen one day, but I imagine it will be a slow progression.
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Re: What The Heck Is a Qubit?

Post by tepples »

Espozo wrote:For example, how would you get a robot to fish pickles out of a jar
The same way you get a PCB-assembly robot to fish out individual chips.
and place them on a sandwich without falling off, and if they did, how would it know?
Prevent it by constructing the sandwich inside a container not much bigger than the bun. Did you know Big Mac sandwiches are constructed upside down and McDouble sandwiches aren't?
You'd have to add a bunch of sensors and fancy AI that would drive up the price.
It depends on how much the sensors cost and how many staff they replace.
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Drew Sebastino
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Re: What The Heck Is a Qubit?

Post by Drew Sebastino »

Well, I mean, it's all definitely possible, but we want profitable. Like I said though, I wouldn't be surprised if production was made faster though, which is profitable.

I think a large part of the fact that there seems to be no push for this comes from the fact that big businesses generally don't like to take risks, and if fast food ordering has worked with humans since forever, then why bother changing it?

I'll tell you though, businesses will start to consider if minimum wage ever reaches something insane like $15 (in current money).
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rainwarrior
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Re: What The Heck Is a Qubit?

Post by rainwarrior »

Espozo wrote:Well, one's a single payment while the other is every year. Maintenance can't cost as much as the whole thing.
It certainly can. That's the business model of a lot of companies, really, where the service costs are where they make their real profit.
Espozo wrote:The main problem I see with this is keeping the robot carrying the food sanitary (I'm not even sure how regular fast food workers do this. They'd have to at least touch the bun of a burger, and I doubt they change there gloves every burger)
Tongs can be used to pick up a bun. A spatula can be used to move cooked meat onto the bun. Condiments can be delivered with spoons and squeeze bottles. Et cetera. Go to a fast food restaurant and watch the food handlers and you'll get your questions answered pretty quick.

Gloves are only required for some stages of the process (usually the later stages). A lot of food preparation is just done with clean, naked hands. Gloves interfere with your sense of touch, which keeps you from feeling whether your hands have become dirty. In particular, cross contamination needs to be avoided, like touching raw meat and then transferring the bacteria that lives on it to anything else. You can handle meat with bare hands, but you'll have to wash them before you touch anything else. Gloves can help with that problem.
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