[HN Gopher] Cargo Cult Quantum Factoring
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Cargo Cult Quantum Factoring
Author : FartyMcFarter
Score : 193 points
Date : 2023-01-05 14:38 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (scottaaronson.blog)
(TXT) w3m dump (scottaaronson.blog)
| yalue wrote:
| One of the most fun (?) parts of academia is the unique blend of
| frustration and satisfaction that results when a shoddy paper
| somehow clears peer review only to get eviscerated when it lands
| on the desk of an actual expert.
|
| "the detailed exploration of irrelevancies" LOL, if that isn't a
| "time-tested" method for making a paper _sound_ academic, I don
| 't know what is.
| ramraj07 wrote:
| This is not always the case. SA and Sabine, are the hyper rare
| outliers in this regard. Fields like biology have no such folks
| for variety of reasons (I'm counting out some celebrities
| involved in pointing out actual misconduct instead of sloppy
| work).
| biomcgary wrote:
| Biology has so many exceptions and idiosyncrasies compared to
| physics that being broadly competent is difficult.
|
| Physics found the "zoo" of diverse particles to be inelegant
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Particle_zoo). In biology,
| actual zoos hold a small fraction of diversity at the
| organismal level. The diversity at the molecular level is
| insanely high and the vast majority of "rules" have
| exceptions. Even the Central Dogma of Molecular Biology (http
| s://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_dogma_of_molecular_bio...)
| is a bit messy, unless stated fairly carefully (e.g.,
| https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24965874/).
| lofatdairy wrote:
| Who even are the big science communicators in for current
| research in bio? Nobody comes to mind, not even a non-
| professor.
| dekhn wrote:
| Eric Topol
| faitswulff wrote:
| Akiko Iwasaki aka @virusesimmunity on Twitter is also a
| good follow for, well, viruses and immunity.
|
| Ed Yong for excellent long form journalism.
| cscurmudgeon wrote:
| > the detailed exploration of irrelevancies
|
| Also signals a bad reviewer who wanted their work cited. Not in
| this case though.
| hannob wrote:
| It hasn't cleared peer review, it's a preprint (which is pretty
| common in cryptography, peer review usually happens when
| results are already old news).
| 0xf00ff00f wrote:
| In the original paper they claim to have factored a 48-bit number
| with an implementation of their algorithm. Did they use some kind
| of trick?
| fsh wrote:
| The actual work is done by a classical computer. Factoring a
| 48-bit number is not exactly difficult.
| chowells wrote:
| Why would they need to have done so? The blog post argues
| there's no evidence this is any faster than classical Schnorr's
| algorithm, and classical Schnorr's algorithm can easily factor
| a 48-bit number.
|
| And as the post also makes very sure to point out, Schnorr !=
| Shor.
| Bootvis wrote:
| Shnorr != Schnorr
| chowells wrote:
| Eh. Spelling is hard, especially when you don't know the
| country of origin for proper names. What're you gonna do?
| yowzadave wrote:
| Also Schnorr != Shor != Schneier, which was a confusion in
| the HN thread about Bruce Schneier's response to this paper
| Tomte wrote:
| Real title: Cargo Cult Quantum Factoring
| [deleted]
| jwilk wrote:
| The submission title was "Scott Aaronson weighs in on purported
| quantum factoring breakthrough", but it's been fixed.
| cs702 wrote:
| He's referring to this:
|
| https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.12372
|
| Scott's take:
|
| _> NO. JUST NO._
| melling wrote:
| There are over 20 names on that paper. That is unusual?
| moffkalast wrote:
| In academia? No. Everyone and their mom will add their name
| to any paper they can to get references.
| stephc_int13 wrote:
| Yeah, and this is a as bad as it sounds.
|
| A pyramidal scheme, nothing less.
| computerphage wrote:
| I don't know why you're downvoted. I think it's not unusual
| given the field. Certainly some fields have much larger
| average number of authors than others
| 77pt77 wrote:
| This is not experimental particle physics, where CERN just
| publishes everyone in CMS or ATLAS.
|
| Apparently the most recent ones just mention the *
| Collaboration, but I distinctively remember seeing papers
| with hundreds of names in the author list.
| svat wrote:
| Contrast with HN discussion of the purported breakthrough:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34235350
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| I'm not seeing the contrast. Aaronson speaks more definitively.
| But the top comments on HN [1][2] were well-reasoned
| scepticism.
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34237886
|
| [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34237218
| svat wrote:
| While it's indeed true that the top two threads' root
| comments are sceptical, replies to them, and further threads,
| present counter-arguments -- one could easily come away from
| reading the HN discussion thinking that there's something to
| this paper. (And indeed, see
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34261645)
| barathr wrote:
| And Schneier's own post expressed skepticism while noting
| that this is something that should be check-able now.
| cwillu wrote:
| [flagged]
| detrites wrote:
| [flagged]
| ablatt89 wrote:
| It looks like the paper specifically claims to create an
| optimized quantum algorithm for SR pair finding which is most
| time consuming part the Schnorr fatoring algorithm. It starts
| with a classical computational lattice problem, defines the
| optimization problem in a specific form (3), and then maps it to
| a Hamiltonian to represent a lattice matrix and a PauliZ matrix
| ((1, 0), (0, -1)) (4) and if we have a Hamiltonian, we can create
| a QC.
|
| The proof of the reduced memory complexity is linked in section
| 31 but it is really long winded however, it seems the classical
| Schnorr lattice reduction problem for factoring integers has a
| space complexity of O((logN)^(a)/a*loglogN)) which according to
| the author, since the paper can map SR pair finding (the time
| consuming piece of Schnorr's algorithm) to a Hamiltonian, we then
| have a quantum factoring algorithm of the same complexity.
|
| Seems pretty handwavy to me.
| [deleted]
| escape_goat wrote:
| I have no comment of actual value to contribute but I note that
| by the standards of the field we can infer the existence of the
| Schxorr algorithm.
| furyofantares wrote:
| Earlier comment thread on Schneier's post about it:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34235350
|
| I find this an interesting case because most of us probably can't
| rely on very much of our own reasoning to evaluate, and rely on
| beliefs about Schneier or Aaronson or other posters here.
|
| At least I noticed I was less skeptical than I otherwise would be
| due to the earlier post coming from Schneier, despite some very
| critical comments of the paper here, and then also noticed this
| slight hesitation to be skeptical went away completely with
| Scott's post.
| [deleted]
| A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote:
| << If I'm slow to answer comments, it'll be because I'm dealing
| with two screaming kids.
|
| This is about the only downside ( and simultaneous benefit ) of
| staying at home. I am genuinely glad he weighed in. I do not have
| enough background knowledge to evaluate the initial claims.
| RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote:
| > All told, this is one of the most actively misleading quantum
| computing papers I've seen in 25 years, and I've seen ... many.
| ramdac wrote:
| Tl;dr? = there's no breakthrough.
| jp57 wrote:
| It's really not tl, tho.
| yshavit wrote:
| And it contains its own tldr, in the form of "<h2>No. Just
| No.</h2>".
|
| We need a new acronym: tl;dc: "too lazy; didn't click"
| taylorius wrote:
| >No. Just No.
|
| tl;dr?
| dQw4w9WgXcQ wrote:
| Eventually Scott Aaronson will be wrong. Call it a reverse black
| swan, but we will all remember it as the day the quantum
| computing era began.
| krastanov wrote:
| Scott Aaronson is not a quantum-computing skeptic, quite the
| opposite, he has always seemed optimistic about its prospects
| and his work has been fundamental to progress in the field. He
| just does not like hyped-up work that has little substance. If
| anything, Bruce Schneier should have been a bit more skeptical
| - this type hyped-up unreviewed preprint papers appear very
| frequently these days.
| inasio wrote:
| Just wanted to point out that Scott Aaronson is not one of
| those anti quantum curmudgeons. Besides bashing on companies
| with questionable claims, I think he's been pretty open minded
| about looking for problems and algorithms with actual quantum
| advantages.
| nyrikki wrote:
| As someone who lived though one AI winter and seriously fears
| another, I view fighting hype is important to allowing useful
| research to happen.
|
| 'Super position' and 'entanglement' have been overly
| mystified in QM in general and the implications of
| probabilistic Turing machines vs the typical non-
| deterministic Turning machine examples is important.
|
| While probabilistic Turing machines are non-deterministic,
| they don't work the way that most examples offer.
|
| Same problem with elementary descriptions of entropy so it
| isn't just the quantum fields problem.
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| Scott Aaronson is more than willing to praise research whenever
| there has been actual progress made. There is just a lot of
| bullshit in his field (or maybe there is a normal amount of
| bullshit but it is amplified more by the media).
| dekhn wrote:
| The bullshit ratio in quantum computing is the highest I've
| seen in any field, followed only by ML (the difference being
| that there is ML non-bullshit, while quantum computing hasn't
| been shown to be useful for any real problem, but there have
| been huge advances in the underlying technologies).
| krastanov wrote:
| Quantum sensing is a pretty huge *practical* advance that
| is due to the overall work of Quantum Information Science
| (computing included).
| fsh wrote:
| To my knowledge the only "practical" application of
| quantum sensing so far has been the use of squeezed light
| in some gravitational wave detectors. However, this has
| absolutely nothing to do with quantum information
| science. Getting an actual advantage out of quantum
| effects has so far been remarkably difficult.
| krastanov wrote:
| Answering here, but this really covers the sibling
| comment from dekhn.
|
| To me it seem quite wild to have quantum sensing
| separated from the rest of quantum information science.
| It would be like saying that classical SNR considerations
| are unrelated to Shannon's introduction of error
| correcting codes (the birth of information science). But
| if that is your preference, it does not make much sense
| to argue. Either way, most scientist who work on quantum
| information science also see their work apply
| specifically to sensing.
|
| Similarly, it seems strange to me to insist on
| specifically focusing on quantum computing, when the
| majority of technology developments in quantum
| information science apply both to sensing and to
| computing (one of which is simply easier thanks to its
| analog nature).
| dekhn wrote:
| I think it's a stretch to relate that to quantum
| computing, which normally describes making systems that
| can... well, compute! Quantum sensing is more an
| application of quantum theory and exploitation of quantum
| effects to improve photonics applications.
| vouaobrasil wrote:
| As a former researcher in the sciences, I get the feeling that
| "cargo cult" research is not all that uncommon, especially when a
| idea gets embedded in the popular stream of thought. There is a
| whole cluster of cargo cult publishing when it comes to
| evolutionary theory because of the misunderstanding of natural
| selection. In mathematics there is Godel's incompleteness
| theorems, and in computer science we have quantum computing.
|
| With regard to quantum computing, I find it as irritating as the
| author of the blog. And I honestly think the internet is to
| blame, because it has increased the reward for being notorious,
| at least in the sense that there is more attention bestowed upon
| you for making spurious claims. And I believe the internet is
| also to blame for people desiring such attention, because the
| technology of the internet has displaced genuine, social
| interaction with superficial fluff that bears little resemblance
| to what humans actually need to feel socially fulfilled.
| adamsmith143 wrote:
| I did graduate work in Materials Science and the understanding in
| our lab was to be very skeptical of papers from China,
| particularly from the State Key Labs as they were very often
| impossible to replicate and ended up being useless. Seems
| relevant to this paper as well.
| qwezxcrty wrote:
| [flagged]
| mmcgaha wrote:
| My racist view is that Chinese people are smarter than
| western people.
|
| Do you have a problem with that type of racism?
|
| What if it is true?
|
| If it is just my personal observation but don't make
| decisions based on race, am I still a bad person for
| recognizing a pattern in the people I know?
| 778hbff wrote:
| By this argument you are validating the invalid type of
| argument GP is making.
| mmcgaha wrote:
| The only people who are pure of heart live in a tribe
| that has never interacted with outsiders. Everyone else
| is tainted.
| TchoBeer wrote:
| There are tons, literally hundreds of Chinese-Americans and
| Chinese-Europeans and Chinese immigrants living all over the
| world who do research, and their work is not at all suspect.
| The reason why Chinese papers are suspect has to do with the
| academic and financial incentives which exist in the modern
| day People's Republic of China. With that being said, it's
| definitely possible that Chinese papers are perceived as
| suspect for racist reasons as well.
| NotYourLawyer wrote:
| China the country, not Chinese the race. They're not the
| same, and it's not racism to throw shade at a country that
| deserves shade.
| dekhn wrote:
| Can you explain, in detail, why you believe that making a
| statement about the scientific output of a country, as
| measured by paper quality, is necessarily racist? In
| particular, I'm going to challenge you on this because the
| "racism" argument has been used as an easy cop-out to
| denigrate an opinion all-too-commonly.
|
| Please just explain your thinking of why it's "racist".
| Assume your reader is aware of the effects of socioeconomic
| status, national ambitions to become a science powerhouse,
| and the incentives to publish groundbreaking work.
| 778hbff wrote:
| The criticism was on the country, representing its system of
| academic publications, not on Chinese people and
| characteristics unique to their genetics or similar.
|
| Your argument is similar to calling anybody an antisemite who
| criticizes Israels politics. You're rightfully being
| downvoted.
| colechristensen wrote:
| A country, and specific institutions within, having a bad
| reputation for published research reliability isn't racism.
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