[HN Gopher] Actual Uses for Near-Term Quantum Computers
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Actual Uses for Near-Term Quantum Computers
Author : rbanffy
Score : 10 points
Date : 2024-03-21 20:13 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (spectrum.ieee.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (spectrum.ieee.org)
| apimade wrote:
| > and destroying Internet security seems like a dubious reason to
| build a new machine
|
| In the same way technological advancements in radar and signals
| brought aerial superiority, the first-mover in PQC will bring
| both technical and cybersecurity superiority.
|
| In 2015 people assumed we'd need 1 billion qubit computers to
| break 2048-bit RSA.
|
| That estimate changed to 20 million in 2019.
|
| We're 5 years on from that and quantum supercomputers are 16x
| more powerful than they were in 2019.
|
| Based on our current rate of advancement, we'll likely be there
| within 10 years or less, even if the estimated amount of
| resources required don't decrease from improvements on the
| cracking side.
| vouaobrasil wrote:
| > In the same way technological advancements in radar and
| signals brought aerial superiority, the first-mover in PQC will
| bring both technical and cybersecurity superiority.
|
| I wish humanity would not be so obsessed with superiority. It's
| disgusting.
| rbanffy wrote:
| I think of them now as special-purpose accelerators, or, perhaps
| better, analog computers for simulating quantum phenomena.
|
| But that's because of their current limitations - they still need
| a classical computer to set them up, the same way analog
| computers were configured to perform a specific job with wires,
| amplifiers, and function generators (because we didn't have
| digital computers that could do that for us). What would a
| function itself represented as a network of qubits to be applied
| on data qubits even look like?
| sudosysgen wrote:
| There is such a thing as a quantum Turing machine. A classical
| computer isn't needed in theory so long as you can make a
| quantum register, it's just way better to set it up with a
| classical computer instead of a temperamental and expensive
| quantum one.
| mjfl wrote:
| understanding quantum phenomena associated with developing a
| quantum computer is in itself cool enough to justify investment
| into it, at least at the academic level. People have been making
| these really cool electronic devices, making 'magic' atoms with
| protected quantum states. Quantum computing, even if a working
| device never gets constructed, is like a bottomless well of
| interesting quantum curiosities.
| jameswryan wrote:
| > ... destroying Internet security seems like a dubious reason to
| build a new machine.
|
| I can't agree with this; Destroying internet security is an
| excellent reason to build a new machine.
| billti wrote:
| Shameless plug: But these types of areas of research (what types
| of problems can quantum computers solve and when) has been a big
| focus of our open-source Q# effort lately. You can see our last
| two blog posts (https://devblogs.microsoft.com/qsharp/) are about
| the resource estimation features we've recently built for exactly
| this purpose. You can give them a try pretty easily in VS Code or
| just in the browser (https://aka.ms/AQ/RE/Docs)
|
| Disclaimer: I work on the Q# project
| (https://github.com/microsoft/qsharp) in a team under Matthias
| Troyer (quoted in the article).
|
| Entirely personal option: I do think tempering some of the hype
| of the past few years/decades and focusing on the areas of
| highest potential is in general a good thing. Progress hasn't
| been what some optimists had hoped for, but hardware has been
| progressing quite quickly & consistently for years now, and I'm
| confident we'll get there eventually.
| the__prestige wrote:
| TFA article mentions 5 use cases that are supposedly "within the
| coming decade" and uses terms such as "few million qubits" "more
| qubits than are currently available" and "within reach",
| basically implying that there aren't any use cases possible now.
| This seems to reinforce skepticism[1] expressed by other
| researchers that practical uses of quantum computing will very
| likely be different from what we thought possible before, quote -
| "big compute" problems on small data, not big data problems.
|
| As a newbie I seriously would like to know - are there ANY known
| real world applications of quantum computing that are possible
| today?
|
| [1] https://cacm.acm.org/research/disentangling-hype-from-
| practi...
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