[HN Gopher] Understanding Google's Quantum Error Correction Brea...
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Understanding Google's Quantum Error Correction Breakthrough
Author : GavCo
Score : 71 points
Date : 2024-11-22 17:53 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.quantum-machines.co)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.quantum-machines.co)
| terminalbraid wrote:
| Note the paper they are referring to was published August 27,
| 2024
|
| https://arxiv.org/pdf/2408.13687
| dangerlibrary wrote:
| I'm someone not really aware of the consequences of each quantum
| of progress in quantum computing. But, I know that I'm exposed to
| QC risks in that at some point I'll need to change every security
| key I've ever generated and every crypto algorithm every piece of
| software uses.
|
| How much closer does this work bring us to the Quantum Crypto
| Apocalypse? How much time do I have left before I need to start
| budgeting it into my quarterly engineering plan?
| griomnib wrote:
| The primary threat model is data collected _today_ via mass
| surveillance that is _currently_ unbreakable will _become_
| breakable.
|
| There are already new "quantum-proof" security mechanisms being
| developed for that reason.
| sroussey wrote:
| Yes, and people are recording encrypted conversations
| communications now for this reason.
| bawolff wrote:
| Perhaps, but you got to ask yourself how valuable will your
| data be 20-30 years in the future. For some people that is a
| big deal maybe. For most people that is a very low risk
| threat. Most private data has a shelf life where it is no
| longer valuable.
| bdamm wrote:
| I'm not sure anyone really knows this although there is no
| shortage of wild speculation.
|
| If you have keys that need to be robust for 20 years you should
| probably be looking into trying out some of the newly NIST
| approved standard algorithms.
| er4hn wrote:
| You'll need to focus on asym and DH stuff. If your symmetric
| keys are 256 bits you should be fine there.
|
| The hope is that most of this should just be: Update to the
| latest version of openssl / openssh / golang-crypto / what have
| you and make sure you have the handshake settings use the
| latest crypto algorithms. This is all kind of far flung because
| there is very little consensus around how to change protocols
| for various human reasons.
|
| At some point you'll need to generate new asym keys as well,
| which is where I think things will get interesting. HW based
| solutions just don't exist today and will probably take a long
| time due to the inevitable cycle of: companies want to meet us
| fed gov standards due to regulations / selling to fedgov,
| fedgov is taking their sweet time to standardize protocols and
| seem to be interested in wanting to add more certified
| algorithms as well, actually getting something approved for
| FIPS 140 (the relevant standard) takes over a year at this
| point just to get your paperwork processed, everyone wants to
| move faster. Software can move quicker in terms of development,
| but you have the normal tradeoffs there with keys being easier
| to exfiltrate and the same issue with formal certification.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Maybe my tinfoil hat is a bit too tight, but every time
| fedgov wants a new algo certified I question how strong it is
| and if they've already figured out a weakness. Once bitten
| twice shy or something????
| jiggawatts wrote:
| The NSA has definitely weakened or back-doored crypto. It's
| not a conspiracy or even a secret! It was a matter of
| (public) law in the 90s, such as "export grade" crypto.
|
| Most recently Dual_EC_DRBG was forced on American vendors
| by the NSA, but the backdoor private key was replaced by
| Chinese hackers in some Juniper devices and used by them to
| spy on westerners.
|
| Look up phrase likes "nobody but us" (NOBUS), which is the
| aspirational goal of these approaches, but often fails,
| leaving everyone including Americans and their allies
| exposed.
| dylan604 wrote:
| You should look up the phrase "once bitten twice shy" as
| I think you missed the gist of my comment. We've already
| been bitten at least once by incidents as you've
| described. From then on, it will always be in the back of
| my mind that friendly little suggestions on crypto algos
| from fedgov will always be received with suspicion.
| Accepting that, most people that are unawares will assume
| someone is wearing a tinfoil hat.
| bawolff wrote:
| > But, I know that I'm exposed to QC risks in that at some
| point I'll need to change every security key I've ever
| generated and every crypto algorithm every piece of software
| uses.
|
| Probably not. Unless a real sudden unexpected breakthrough
| happens, best practise will be to use crypto-resistant
| algorithms long before this becones a relavent issue.
|
| And practically speaking its only public-key crypto that is an
| issue, your symmetric keys are fine (oversimplifying slightly,
| but practically speaking this is true)
| computerdork wrote:
| Does anyone on HN have a understanding how close this achievement
| brings us to useful quantum computers?
| kittikitti wrote:
| This is another hype piece from Google's research and
| development arm. This is a theoretical application to increase
| the number of logical qubits in a system by decreasing the
| error caused by quantum circuts. They just didn't do the last
| part yet so the application is yet to be seen.
|
| https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.13687
|
| "Our results present device performance that, if scaled, could
| realize the operational requirements of large scale fault-
| tolerant quantum algorithms."
|
| Google forgot to test if it scales I guess?
| wholinator2 wrote:
| Lol yeah the whole problem with quantum computation is the
| scaling, that's literally the entire problem. It's trivial to
| make a qbit, harder to make 5, impossible to make 1000. "If
| it scales" is just wishy washy language to cover, "in the
| ideal scenario where everything works perfectly and nothing
| goes wrong, it will work perfectly"
| layer8 wrote:
| The fact that there is a forward-looking subsection about "the
| _vision_ for fault tolerance" (emphasis mine) almost entirely
| composed of empty words and concluding in "we are just starting
| this exciting journey, so stay tuned for what's to come!" tells
| you "not close at all".
| xscott wrote:
| While I'm still eager to see where Quantum Computing leads, I've
| got a new threshold for "breakthrough": Until a quantum computer
| can factor products of primes larger than a few bits, I'll
| consider it a work in progress at best.
| kridsdale1 wrote:
| There will be a thousand breakthroughs before that point.
| xscott wrote:
| That just means that the word "breakthrough" has lost it's
| meaning. I would suggest the word "advancement", but I know
| this is a losing battle.
| Suppafly wrote:
| >That just means that the word "breakthrough" has lost it's
| meaning.
|
| This. Small, incremental and predictable advances aren't
| breakthroughs.
| UberFly wrote:
| I guess like most of these kinds of projects, it'll be smaller,
| less flashy breakthroughs or milestones along the way.
| dekhn wrote:
| quantum computers can (should be able to; do not currently)
| solve many useful problems without ever being able to factor
| primes.
| Eji1700 wrote:
| Yeah I think that's the issue that makes it hard to assess
| quantum computing.
|
| My very layman understanding is that there are certain things
| it will be several orders of magnitude better at, but
| "simple" things for a normal machine quantum will be just as
| bad if not massively worse.
|
| It really should be treated as a different tool for right
| now. Maybe some day in the very far future if it becomes
| easier to make quantum computers an abstraction layer will be
| arrived at in some manner that means the end user thinks it's
| just like a normal computer, but from a "looking at series of
| 1/0's" or "looking at a series of superimposed particles"
| it's extremely different in function.
| xscott wrote:
| What are some good examples?
|
| The one a few years ago where Google declared "quantum
| supremacy" sounded a lot like simulating a noisy circuit by
| implementing a noisy circuit. And that seems a lot like
| _simulating_ the falling particles and their collisions in an
| hour glass by using a physical hour glass.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| Is this an actually good explanation? The introduction
| immediately made me pause:
|
| > In classical computers, error-resistant memory is achieved by
| duplicating bits to detect and correct errors. A method called
| majority voting is often used, where multiple copies of a bit are
| compared, and the majority value is taken as the correct bit
|
| No in classical computers memory is corrected for using error
| correction not duplicating bits and majority voting. Duplicating
| bits would be a very wasteful strategy if you can add
| significantly fewer bits and achieve the same result which is
| what you get with error correction techniques like ECC. Maybe
| they got it confused with logic circuits where there's not any
| more efficient strategy?
| outworlder wrote:
| That threw me off as well. Majority voting works for industries
| like aviation, but that's still about checking results of
| computations, not all memory addresses.
| UniverseHacker wrote:
| ECC is not easy to explain, and sounds like a tautology rather
| than an explanation "error correction is done with error
| correction"- unless you give a full technical explanation of
| exactly what ECC is doing.
| marcellus23 wrote:
| Regardless of whether the parent's sentence is a tautology,
| the explanation in the article is categorically wrong.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| Yeah, I couldn't quite remember if ECC is just hamming
| codes or is using something more modern like fountain codes
| although those are technically FEC. So in the absence of
| stating something incorrectly I went with the tautology.
| bawolff wrote:
| Categorically might be a bit much. Duplicating bits with
| majority voting is an error correction code, its just not a
| very efficient one.
|
| Like its wrong, but its not like its totally out of this
| world wrong. Or more speciglficly its in the correct
| category.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| It's categorically wrong to say that that's how memory is
| error corrected in classical computers because it is not
| and never has been how it was done. Even for systems like
| S3 that replicate, there's no error correction happening
| in the replicas and the replicas are eventually converted
| to erasure codes.
| cortesoft wrote:
| Eh, I don't think it is categorically wrong... ECCs are
| based on the idea of sacrificing some capacity by adding
| redundant bits that can be used to correct for some number
| of errors. The simplest ECC would be just duplicating the
| data, and it isn't categorically different than real ECCs
| used.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| Then you're replicating and not error correcting. I've
| not seen any replication systems that use the replicas to
| detect errors. Even RAID 1 which is a pure mirroring
| solution only fetches one of the copies when reading &
| will ignore corruption on one of the disks unless you
| initiate a manual verification. There are technical
| reasons why that is related to read amplification as well
| as what it does to your storage cost.
| cortesoft wrote:
| I guess that is true, pure replication would not allow
| you to correct errors, only detect them.
|
| However, I think explaining the concept as duplicating
| some data isn't horrible wrong for non technical people.
| It is close enough to allow the person to understand the
| concept.
| refulgentis wrote:
| I think it's fundamentally misleading, even on the central
| quantum stuff:
|
| I missed what you saw, that's certainly a massive oof. It's not
| even wrong, in the Pauli sense, i.e. it's not just a simplistic
| rendering of ECC.
|
| It also strongly tripped my internal GPT detector.
|
| Also, it goes on and on about realtime decoding, the foundation
| of the article is Google's breakthrough _is_ real time, and the
| Google article was quite clear that it isn 't real time.*
|
| I'm a bit confused, because it seems completely wrong, yet they
| published it, and there's enough phrasing that definitely
| _doesn 't_ trip my GPT detector. My instinct is someone who
| doesn't have years of background knowledge / formal comp sci &
| physics education made a valiant effort.
|
| I'm reminded that my throughly /r/WSB-ified MD friend brings up
| "quantum computing is gonna be big what stonks should I buy"
| every 6 months, and a couple days ago he sent me a screenshot
| of my AI app that had a few conversations with him hunting for
| opportunities.
|
| * "While AlphaQubit is great at accurately identifying errors,
| it's still too slow to correct errors in a superconducting
| processor in real time"
| vlovich123 wrote:
| Yeah, I didn't want to just accuse the article of being AI
| generated since quantum isn't my specialty, but this kind of
| error instantly tripped my "it doesn't sound like this person
| knows what they're talking about alarm" which likely
| indicates a bad LLM helped summarize the quantum paper for
| the author.
| bramathon wrote:
| This is not about AlphaQubit. It's about a different paper,
| https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.13687 and they do demonstrate
| real-time decoding.
|
| > we show that we can maintain below-threshold operation on
| the 72-qubit processor even when decoding in real time,
| meeting the strict timing requirements imposed by the
| processor's fast 1.1 ms cycle duration
| abtinf wrote:
| This seems like the kind of error an LLM would make.
|
| It is essentially impossible for a human to confuse error
| correction and "majority voting"/consensus.
| GuB-42 wrote:
| I don't believe it is the result of a LLM, more like an
| oversimplification, or maybe a minor fuckup on the part of
| the author as simple majority voting is often used in
| redundant systems, just not for memories as there are better
| ways.
|
| And for a LLM result, this is what ChatGPT says when asked
| "How does memory error correction differ from quantum error
| correction?", among other things.
|
| > Relies on redundancy by encoding extra bits into the data
| using techniques like parity bits, Hamming codes, or Reed-
| Solomon codes.
|
| And when asked for a simplified answer
|
| > Classical memory error correction fixes mistakes in regular
| computer data (0s and 1s) by adding extra bits to check for
| and fix any errors, like a safety net catching flipped bits.
| Quantum error correction, on the other hand, protects
| delicate quantum bits (qubits), which can hold more complex
| information (like being 0 and 1 at the same time), from
| errors caused by noise or interference. Because qubits are
| fragile and can't be directly measured without breaking their
| state, quantum error correction uses clever techniques
| involving multiple qubits and special rules of quantum
| physics to detect and fix errors without ruining the quantum
| information.
|
| Absolutely no mention of majority voting here.
|
| EDIT: GPT-4o mini does mention majority voting as an example
| of a memory error correction scheme but not as _the_ way to
| do it. The explanation is overall more clumsy, but generally
| correct, I don 't know enough about quantum error correction
| to fact-check.
| mmooss wrote:
| People always have made bad assumptions or had
| misunderstandings. Maybe the author just doesn't understand
| ECC and always assumed it was consensus-based. I do things
| like that (I try not to write about them without verifying);
| I'm confident that so do you and everyone reading this.
| Suppafly wrote:
| >Maybe the author just doesn't understand ECC and always
| assumed it was consensus-based.
|
| That's likely, or it was LLM output and the author didn't
| know enough to know it was wrong. We've seen that in a lot
| of tech articles lately where authors assume that something
| that is true-ish in one area is also true in another, and
| it's obvious they just don't understand other area they are
| writing about.
| weinzierl wrote:
| Maybe they were thinking of control systems where duplicating
| memory, lockstep cores and majority voting are used. You don't
| even have to go to space to encounter such a system, you likely
| have one in your car.
| bramathon wrote:
| The explanation of Google's error correction experiment is
| basic but fine. People should keep in mind that Quantum
| Machines sells control electronics for quantum computers which
| is why they focus on the control and timing aspects of the
| experiment. I think a more general introduction to quantum
| error correction would be more relevant to the Hackernews
| audience.
| bawolff wrote:
| Doesn't feel like a breakthrough. A positive engineering step
| forward, sure, but not a breakthrough.
|
| And wtf does AI have to do with this?
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