[HN Gopher] Willow, Our Quantum Chip
___________________________________________________________________
Willow, Our Quantum Chip
Author : robflaherty
Score : 1324 points
Date : 2024-12-09 16:28 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.google)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.google)
| tombert wrote:
| Interesting; it might be time for me to load up a quantum
| simulator and star learning how to program these things.
|
| I've pushed that off for a long time since I wasn't completely
| convinced that quantum computers actually worked, but I think I
| was wrong.
| nick__m wrote:
| IBM has well structured learning material and a quantum
| simulator at https://learning.quantum.ibm.com/
|
| Also my almamater made the quantum enigmas series that is
| appropriate for high-school students (it also interesting if
| you have no prior knowledge about quantum computing)
| https://www.usherbrooke.ca/iq/quantumenigmas/ (it also use IBM
| online learning platform)
| gordon_freeman wrote:
| So one of the interesting comparisons between Quantum computing
| vs classical in the video: 5 mins vs 10^25 years. So are there
| any tradeoffs or specific cases in which the use cases for
| Quantum computing works or is this generic for "all" computing
| use cases? if later then this will change everything and would
| change the world.
| dabeeeenster wrote:
| Its for a very, very, very narrow set of algorithms AFAIUI.
| antognini wrote:
| There are only certain kinds of computing tasks which are
| amenable to an exponential speedup from quantum computing. For
| many classical algorithms the best you get from a quantum
| computer is an improvement by a factor of sqrt(N) by using
| Grover's algorithm.
|
| The other tradeoff is that quantum computers are much noisier
| than classical computers. The error rate of classical computers
| is exceedingly low, to the extent that most programmers can go
| their entire career without even considering it as a
| possibility. But you can see from the figures in this post that
| even in a state of the art chip, the error rates are of order
| ~0.03--0.3%. Hopefully this will go down over time, but it's
| going to be a non-negligible aspect of quantum computing for
| the foreseeable future.
| pitpatagain wrote:
| It is specific to cases where a quantum algorithm exists that
| provides speedup, it is not at all generic. The complexity
| class of interest is BQP: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BQP
|
| Also of note: P is in BQP, but it is not proven that BQP != P.
| Some problems like factoring have a known polynomial time
| algorithm, and the best known classical algorithm is
| exponential, which is where you see these massive speedups. But
| we don't know that there isn't an unknown polynomial time
| classical factoring algorithm and we just haven't discovered it
| yet. It is a (widely believed) conjecture, that there are hard
| problems solved in BQP that are outside P.
| nuz wrote:
| Every time this comes up people say they're not actually useful
| for ML. Is that true? And if not what would they be useful for
| christkv wrote:
| In principal NP complete problems is my guess.
| wazdra wrote:
| It is unknown whether quantum computing makes NP-complete
| problems easier to solve. There is a complexity class for
| problems that can be solved "efficiently" on using quantum
| computing, called BQP. How BQP and NP are related is unknown.
| In particular, if an NP-complete problem was shown to be
| solvable efficiently with Quantum Computing (and thus in
| BQP), this open (and hard) research question would be solved
| (or at least half of it).
|
| Note that BQP is not "efficient" in a real-word fashion, but
| for theoretical study of Quantum computing, it's a good first
| guess
| benbayard wrote:
| AFAIK, which is not much, I believe it is problems that you
| can turn in to a cycle. Right now we pull out answers from
| quantum computers at random, but typically do not know what
| the inputs were that got that answer. But if you can get the
| answers from the quantum computer to be cyclical you can use
| that symmetry to get all the information you need.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| breaking crypto, for one
| LampCharger wrote:
| No, a true quantum computer will not necessarily solve NP-
| complete (NPC) problems efficiently. Quantum algorithms like
| Grover's provide quadratic speedups, but this is insufficient
| to turn exponential-time solutions into polynomial-time ones.
| While quantum computers excel in specific tasks (e.g., Shor's
| algorithm for factoring), there's no evidence they can solve
| all NP-complete problems efficiently.
|
| Current complexity theory suggests that , the class of problems
| solvable by quantum computers, does not encompass . Quantum
| computers may aid in approximations or heuristics for NPC
| problems but won't fundamentally resolve them in polynomial
| time unless , which remains unlikely.
| vessenes wrote:
| Factoring. Reversing ECC operations. Decrypting all the data
| thought to be safely stored at rest in any non quantum
| resistant storage.
|
| I do think ai algorithms could be built that quantum gates
| could be fast at, but I don't have any ideas off the top of my
| head this morning. If you think of AI training as searching the
| space of computational complexity and quantum algorithms as
| accessing a superposition of search states I would guess
| there's an intersection. Google thinks so too - the lab is
| called quantum ai.
| jawns wrote:
| > It lends credence to the notion that quantum computation occurs
| in many parallel universes, in line with the idea that we live in
| a multiverse
|
| I see the evidence, and I see the conclusion, but there's a lot
| of ellipses between the evidence and the conclusion.
|
| Do quantum computing folks really think that we are borrowing
| capacity from other universes for these calculations?
| gaze wrote:
| I'm upset they put this in because this is absolutely not the
| view of most quantum foundations researchers.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| the everettian view is absolutely not the view? i am not so
| sure.
|
| or you mean specifically the parallel computation view?
| gaze wrote:
| sorry -- the results don't add weight to one view or the
| other. The interpretations are equivalent.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| not metaphysically equivalent. also, i'm not so certain
| it will always be untestable. i would have thought the
| same thing about hidden variables but i underestimated
| the cleverness of experimentalists
| DennisP wrote:
| I think "experimentally equivalent" is what GP meant, and
| as of today, it holds true. Google's results are
| predicted by other interpretations just as well as by
| Everett. Maybe someday there will be a clever experiment
| to distinguish the models but just "we have a good QC" is
| not that.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| i think you're arguing against a point i never made in
| any of my comments
| wasabi991011 wrote:
| In my opinion the "shut up and calculate" view is the most
| common among actual quantum computing researchers.
|
| Unsure about those working on quantum foundations, but I
| think the absence of consensus is enough to claim any view
| as absolutely not _the_ view.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| i don't really view "shut up and calculate" or very
| restrained copenhagenism as a real view at all.
|
| i think if you were to ask people to make a real
| metaphysical speculation, majority might be partial to
| everett - especially if they felt confident the results
| were anonymous
| wasabi991011 wrote:
| I agree, but that kind of goes to my point:
|
| I believe the vast majority of researchers in quantum
| computing* spend almost no time on metaphysical
| speculation,
|
| *Well, those on the "practical side" that thinks about
| algorithms and engineering quantum systems like the
| Google Quantum AI team and others. Not the computer
| science theorists knee-deep in quantum computational
| complexity proofs nor physics theorists working on
| foundations of quantum mechanics. But these last two
| categories are outnumbered by the "practical" side.
| spookie wrote:
| Seeing to believe is indeed a view, as they would have to
| view it in order to believe!
| klipt wrote:
| Soon: "are alien universes slowing down _your_ internet?
| Click here to learn more! "
|
| Reminds me of the Aorist Rods from Hitchhikers' Guide to the
| Galaxy.
| rafram wrote:
| Well there has to be _some_ reason I 'm not getting the
| "gigabit" speeds I was quoted.
| duderific wrote:
| You were probably quoted "up to" gigabit speed. Which
| means anything from zero to gigabit is acceptable.
| sebastiennight wrote:
| Are negative speeds acceptable too?
| ColinHayhurst wrote:
| Credibility of the article plummeted when I got to that
| sentence, and especially since using name dropping.
| ferfumarma wrote:
| One of the biggest problems with such an assertion is that
| it's not falsifiable.
|
| It could be that we are borrowing qbit processing power from
| Russel's quantum teapot.
| hshshshshsh wrote:
| Science is not based on consensus seeking.
|
| Science is about coming up with the best explanations
| irrespective of whether or not a large chunk does not believe
| it.
|
| And best explanations are the ones that is hard to vary. Not
| the one that is most widely accepted or easy to accept based
| on the current world view.
| jayd16 wrote:
| Actually it is exactly based on hypotheses that are
| verified.
| hshshshshsh wrote:
| And how do you verify hypothesis? What is the process to
| do that?
| fwip wrote:
| You use the hypotheses to make predictions and design
| experiments. Then you carry those out and see if they
| support the hypothesis.
|
| Or is this one of those rhetorical questions?
| hshshshshsh wrote:
| Okay. I have a hypothesis that the rain is controlled by
| a god called Ringo. If you pray to Ringo and he listens
| to your prayer it will rain in next 24 hours. If he
| doesn't listen it won't rain. You can also test this
| experimentally by praying and observing the outcomes.
| kelnos wrote:
| I assume this is a rhetorical question, since you are
| perfectly capable of doing a search for "the scientific
| method" on your own.
|
| MWI has not led to any verifiably-correct predictions,
| has it? At least not any that other interpretations can
| also predict, and have other, better properties.
| JanisErdmanis wrote:
| I think the idea here is that the choice on which
| hypothesis to verify is based on the risk assessment of
| the scientist whose goal is to optimize successful
| results and hence better theories are more likely to
| surface. In this way one does not need to form a
| consensus around the theory but instead make consensus on
| what constitutes a successful result.
|
| Ideally this would be true, but funding agencies are
| already preloaded with implicit asssumptions what
| constitutes a scientific progress.
| brisky wrote:
| David is this you?
| kelnos wrote:
| > _Science is not based on consensus seeking._
|
| No, but as non-experts in a given field, the best
| information we have to go on is the consensus among
| scientists who _are_ experts in the field.
|
| Certainly this isn't a perfect metric, and consensus-
| smashing evidence sometimes comes to light, but unless and
| until that happens, we should assume that the people who
| study this sort of thing as their life's work are probably
| more correct than we are.
| justinpombrio wrote:
| From Wikipedia[1]:
|
| A poll of 72 "leading quantum cosmologists and other quantum
| field theorists" conducted before 1991 by L. David Raub
| showed 58% agreement with "Yes, I think MWI is true".[85]
|
| Max Tegmark reports the result of a "highly unscientific"
| poll taken at a 1997 quantum mechanics workshop. According to
| Tegmark, "The many worlds interpretation (MWI) scored second,
| comfortably ahead of the consistent histories and Bohm
| interpretations."[86]
|
| In response to Sean M. Carroll's statement "As crazy as it
| sounds, most working physicists buy into the many-worlds
| theory",[87] Michael Nielsen counters: "at a quantum
| computing conference at Cambridge in 1998, a many-worlder
| surveyed the audience of approximately 200 people... Many-
| worlds did just fine, garnering support on a level comparable
| to, but somewhat below, Copenhagen and decoherence." But
| Nielsen notes that it seemed most attendees found it to be a
| waste of time: Peres "got a huge and sustained round of
| applause...when he got up at the end of the polling and asked
| 'And who here believes the laws of physics are decided by a
| democratic vote?'"[88]
|
| A 2005 poll of fewer than 40 students and researchers taken
| after a course on the Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics at
| the Institute for Quantum Computing University of Waterloo
| found "Many Worlds (and decoherence)" to be the least
| favored.[89]
|
| A 2011 poll of 33 participants at an Austrian conference on
| quantum foundations found 6 endorsed MWI, 8 "Information-
| based/information-theoretical", and 14 Copenhagen;[90] the
| authors remark that MWI received a similar percentage of
| votes as in Tegmark's 1997 poll.[90]
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Many-
| worlds_interpretation#Pol...
| whimsicalism wrote:
| i think if these polls were anonymous, copenhagen would
| lose share. there's a reason why MWI is disproportionately
| popular among people who basically have no professional
| worries because they are already uber-distinguished.
| korkybuchek wrote:
| > Do quantum computing folks really think that we are borrowing
| capacity from other universes for these calculations?
|
| Tangentially related, but there's a great Asimov book about
| this called The Gods Themselves (fiction).
| vessenes wrote:
| I'm partial to Anathem by Stephenson on this topic as well
| korkybuchek wrote:
| Thanks for the recommendation!
| wasabi991011 wrote:
| I was also really taken aback by this quote.
|
| I have no idea who put it there, but I can assure you the
| actual paper contains no such nonsense.
|
| I would have thought whoever writes the google tech blogs is
| more competent than bottom tier science journalists. But in
| this case I think it is more reasonable to assume malice, as
| the post is authored by the Google Quantum AI Lead, and makes
| more sense as hype-boosting buzzword bullshit than as an honest
| misunderstanding that was not caught during editing.
| hshshshshsh wrote:
| Quantum computation done in done multiple universes is the
| explanation given by David Deutsch the father of Quantum
| Computing. He invented the idea of a quantum computer to test
| the idea of parallel universes.
|
| If you are okay with a single universe coming to existence
| out of nothing you should be able to handle parallel
| universes as well just fine.
|
| Also your comment does not have any useful information. You
| assumed hype as the reason why they mentioned parallel
| computing. It's just a bias you have on looking at world.
| Hype does helps explain a lot of things. So it can be
| tempting to use it as a placeholder for anything that you
| don't accept based on your current set of beliefs.
| wasabi991011 wrote:
| I disagree that it is "the best explanation we have". It's
| a nice theory, but like all theories in quantum foundations
| / interpretations of quantum mechanics, it is (at least
| currently) unfalsifiable.
|
| I didn't "assume" hype, I hypothesized it based on the
| evidence before me: There is nothing in Google's paper that
| deals with interpretations of quantum mechanics. This only
| appears in the blog post, with no evidence given. And there
| is nothing google is doing with it's quantum chip that
| would discriminate between interpretations of QM, so it is
| simply false that "It lends credence to ... parallel
| universes" over another interpretation.
| hshshshshsh wrote:
| From what I understand, David Deutsch invented the idea
| of quantum computer as a way to test Parallel Universes.
| And later people went on and built the quantum computer.
| Are you saying that the implementation of a quantum
| computer does not require any kind of assumption on
| computations being run in parallel universes?
| Vecr wrote:
| It's just not how it works. All this type of quantum
| computer can do is test some of the more dubious
| objective collapse theories. Those are wrong anyway, so
| all theories that are still in the running agree.
| lanternfish wrote:
| In short, no.
| kelnos wrote:
| That's right, it doesn't. The implementation of a quantum
| computer does not prove or disprove the existence of
| parallel universes.
| booleandilemma wrote:
| _If you are okay with a single universe coming to existence
| out of nothing you should be able to handle parallel
| universes as well just fine._
|
| We have evidence for this universe though.
| oniony wrote:
| I believe their point was that, if you accept the reality
| of _this_ universe being created from nothing, why
| wouldn't you also accept the notion of _other_ universes
| similarly existing too.
|
| I can get on board with that: that there may be other,
| distinct universes, but I do not understand how this
| would lead to the suggestion they would be necessarily
| linked together with quantum effects.
| nworno wrote:
| Disagree with that. The fact that we reasonably accept a
| well-proven theory (ie the observed universe exists) that
| has some unexplained parts (we don't currently have a
| reasonable explanation for where does that universe comes
| from) doesn't mean that we should therefore accept any
| unproven theory, especially a unfalsifiable one.
| kelnos wrote:
| > _If you are okay with a single universe coming to
| existence out of nothing you should be able to handle
| parallel universes as well just fine._
|
| I can _handle_ it, sure, and the idea of the multiverse is
| attractive to me from a philosophical standpoint.
|
| But we have no evidence that there are any other universes
| out there, while we do have plenty of evidence that our own
| exists. Just because one of something exists, it doesn't
| automatically follow that there are others.
| movpasd wrote:
| There are compelling arguments to believe in the many-worlds
| interpretation.
|
| No sign of a Heisenberg cut has been observed so far, even as
| experiments involving entanglement of larger and larger
| molecules are performed, which makes objective-collapse
| theories hard to consider seriously.
|
| Bohmian theories are nice, but require awkward adjustments to
| reconcile them with relativity. But more importantly, they
| are philosophically uneconomical, requiring many unobservable
| -- even theoretically -- entities [0].
|
| That leaves either many-worlds or a quantum logic/quantum
| Bayesian interpretations as serious contenders [1]. These
| interpretations aren't crank fringe nonsense. They are almost
| inevitable outcomes of seriously considering the implications
| of the theory.
|
| I will say that personally, I find many-worlds to focus
| excessively on the Schrodinger-picture pure state formulation
| of quantum mechanics. (At least to the level that I
| understood it -- I expect there is literature on the
| connection with algebraic formulations, but I haven't taken
| the time to understand it.) So I would lean towards quantum
| logic-type interpretations myself.
|
| The point of this comment was to say that many-worlds (or
| "multiverses", though I dislike the term) isn't nonsense. But
| it also isn't exactly the kind of sci-fi thing non-physicists
| might picture. Given how easy it is to misinterpret the term,
| however, I must agree with you that a self-aware science
| communicator would think twice about whether the term should
| be included, and that there may be not-so-scrupulous
| intentions at play here.
|
| Quick edit: I realise the comment I've written is very
| technical. I'm happy to try to answer any questions. I should
| preface it by stating that I'm not a professional in the
| field, but I studied quantum information theory at a Masters
| level, and always found the philosophical questions of
| interest.
|
| ---
|
| [0] Many people seem to believe that many-worlds also
| postulates the existence of unobservable parallel universes,
| but this isn't true. We observe the interaction of these
| universe's every time we observe quantum interference.
|
| While we're here, we can clear up the misconception about
| "branching" -- there is no branching in many-worlds, just the
| coherent evolution of the universal wave function. The many
| worlds are projections out of that wave function. They don't
| discretely separate from one another, either -- it depends on
| your choice of basis. That choice is where decoherence comes
| in.
|
| [1] And of course, there is the Copenhagen "interpretation"
| -- preferred among physicists who would rather not think
| about philosophy. (A respectable choice.)
| Vecr wrote:
| That's right, I agree that Multiple Worlds isn't any _less_
| correct /falsifiable than quantum mechanics as a whole.
|
| I've never heard about quantum logic before. The "Bayesian"
| part makes sense because of how it treats the statistics,
| but the logic? Is that what quantum computer scientists do
| with their quantum circuits, or is it an actual
| interpretation?
| tsimionescu wrote:
| I think the key point that makes the quoted statement
| sciencey gibberish is that the Many Worlds Interpretation
| is just that - an interpretation. There is no way to prove
| or disprove it (except if you proved that the world is not
| actually quantum mechanical, in which case MWI might not be
| a valid interpretation of the new theory). Saying "this is
| more evidence for MWI" is thus true of any quantum
| mechanical experiment, but anything that is evidence for
| MWI is also exactly as much evidence for Pilot Waves (well,
| assuming it is possible to reconcile with quantum field
| theory), the Copenhagen Interpretation, QBism, and so on.
|
| As a side note, there is still a huge gap between the
| largest system we've ever observed in a superposition and
| the smallest system we've ever observed to behave only
| classically. So there is still _a lot_ of room for
| objective collapse theories, even though that space has
| shrunk by some orders of magnitude since it was first
| proposed. Of course, objective collapse has other, much
| bigger, problems, such as being incompatible with Bell 's
| inequalities.
|
| Edit: I'd also note some things about MWI. First, there are
| many versions of it, some historical, some current. Some
| versions, at least older ones, absolutely did involve
| explicit branching. And the ones that don't have a big
| problem still with explaining why, out of the many ways to
| choose the basis vectors for a measurement, we always end
| up with the same classical measurables in every experiment
| we perform on the world at large. Especially given that we
| know we can measure quantum systems in another other basis
| if we want to. It also ultimately doesn't answer the
| question of why we need the Born rule at all, it still
| postulates that an observer only has access to one possible
| value of the wave function and not to all at once. And of
| course, the problem of defining probabilities in a world
| where everything happens with probability 1 is another
| philosophically thorny issue, especially when you need the
| probabilities to match the amplitude of the wave function.
|
| So the MWI is nice, and it did spawn a very useful and
| measurable observation, decoherence. But it's far from a
| single, satisfying, complete, self-consistent account of
| the world.
| byteknight wrote:
| I would argue because we can't postulate a means of
| testing it now does not mean it is thereby impossible to
| prove; merely currently.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| This would be true if we were talking about something
| like String Theory, or Loop Quantum Gravity.
|
| But it is not true for MWI: MWI was designed from the
| ground up as an interpretation of the mathematics and
| experimental results of quantum mechanics. It is designed
| specifically to not match all of the predictions of
| quantum mechanics, and to not make any new predictions.
| Other interpretations are also designed in the same way.
|
| So, if the people creating these interpretations
| succeeded in their goals when making them, then they will
| never be experimentally verifiable.
| sesm wrote:
| "Many-world interpretation" is just a religion, it has
| nothing to do with physics. Pilot Wave is an example of a
| physical theory, Copenhagen is an administrative agreement.
| smolder wrote:
| I'm pretty sure pilot wave is the same kind of
| unfalsifiable interpretation of the experimental results
| that MWI is. Also I think people are making too big a
| deal out of the comment in the article. I took it as kind
| of tongue-in-cheek. An expert would know MWI is
| unfalsifiable and inconsequential.
| sesm wrote:
| No, Bell Inequality test falsified it.
| smolder wrote:
| Oh my mistake.
| vixen99 wrote:
| Presumably the 'nonsense' is the supposed link between the
| chip and MW theory.
|
| Let me add a recommendation for David Wallace's book The
| Emergent Multiverse - a highly persuasive account of 'quantum
| theory according to the Everett Interpretation'. Aside from
| the technical chapters, much of it is comprehensible to non-
| physicists. It seems that adherents to MW do 'not know how to
| refute an incredulous stare'. (From a quotation)
| ComputerGuru wrote:
| It doesn't make sense to me because if we can borrow capacity
| to perform calculations then we can "borrow" an infinite amount
| of energy.
| griomnib wrote:
| Climate change solved: steal energy from adjacent universes,
| pipe our carbon waste into theirs.
| danielbln wrote:
| Remind me of The Expanse, where the ring space is syphoning
| energy from some other universe to keep the gates open.
| kridsdale1 wrote:
| It's "out of the environment".
| griomnib wrote:
| We're taking negative externalities to a whole new
| dimension!
| FridgeSeal wrote:
| There's a fun short story in qntm's "Valuable Humans In
| Transit" about a scenario like this.
| rdtsc wrote:
| > It lends credence to the notion that quantum computation
| occurs in many parallel universes, in line with the idea that
| we live in a multiverse, a prediction first made by David
| Deutsch.
|
| That's in line with a religious belief. One camp believes one
| thing, other believes something else, others refuse to
| participate and say "shut up and calculate". Nothing wrong with
| religious beliefs of course, it's just important to know that
| is what it is.
| paxys wrote:
| I don't understand the jump from: classical algorithm takes
| time A -> quantum algorithm takes time B -> (A - B) must be
| borrowed from a parallel universe.
|
| Maybe A wasn't the most efficient algorithm for this universe
| to begin with?
| kelnos wrote:
| Right, and that's part of the argument against quantum
| computing being a proof (or disproof) of the many-worlds
| interpretation. Sure, "(A-B) was borrowed from parallel
| universes" is _a_ possible explanation for why quantum
| computing can be so fast, but it 's by far not the only
| possible explanation.
| aithrowawaycomm wrote:
| I suspect the real issue is that Big Tech investors and
| executives (including Sundar Pichai) are utterly hopped up on
| sci-fi, and this sort of stuff convinces them to dedicate
| resources to quantum computing.
| kridsdale1 wrote:
| That explains metaverse funding at least.
| ko27 wrote:
| It's a perfectly legit interpretation of what's happening, and
| many physicists share the same opinion. Of course the big
| caveat is that you need to interfere those worlds so that they
| cancel out, which necessarily requires a lower algorithmic
| bound which prevents you from doing infinite amount of
| computation in an instant.
| johnfn wrote:
| You don't even have to get to the point where you're reading a
| post off Scott Aaronson's blog[1] at all; his headline says "If
| you take nothing else from this blog: quantum computers won't
| solve hard problems instantly by just trying all solutions in
| parallel."
|
| [1]: https://scottaaronson.blog/
| aithrowawaycomm wrote:
| In the same way people believe P != NP, most quantum computing
| people believe BQP != NP, and NP-complete problems will still
| take exponential time on quantum computers. But if we had
| access to arbitrary parallel universes then presumably that
| shouldn't be an issue.
|
| The success on the random (quantum) circuit problem is really a
| valdiation of Feynman's idea, not Deutsch: classical computers
| need 2^n bits to simulate n qubits, so we will need quantum
| computers to efficiently simulate quantum phenomena.
| jumping_frog wrote:
| Does access to arbitrary parallel universes imply that they
| divide up the computation and the correct answer is
| distributed to all of the universes or in such a collection,
| there will be sucker universes which will always receive
| wrong answers ?
| aithrowawaycomm wrote:
| Good question! The whole magic of quantum computation
| versus parallel computation is that the "universe"
| probabilities interfere with each other so that wrong
| answers cancel each other out. So I suppose the wrong
| "universes" still exist somewhere. But it's a whole lot
| less confusing if you view QC as taking place in one
| universe which is fundamentally probabilistic.
| melvinmelih wrote:
| > It performed a computation in under five minutes that would
| take one of today's fastest supercomputers 1025 or 10
| septillion years. If you want to write it out, it's
| 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years.
|
| If it's not, what would be your explanation for this
| significant improvement then?
| Ar-Curunir wrote:
| I mean, that's like saying GPUs operate in parallel universes
| because they can do certain things thousands of times faster
| than CPUs.
| shawabawa3 wrote:
| Quantum computing can perform certain calculations much
| faster than classical computing in the same way classical
| computing can perform certain calculations much faster than
| an abacus
| GenerWork wrote:
| >Do quantum computing folks really think that we are borrowing
| capacity from other universes for these calculations?
|
| Doesn't this also mean that other universes have civilizations
| that could potentially borrow capacity from our universe, and
| if so, what would that look like?
| hshshshshsh wrote:
| The quantum computer idea was literally invented by David
| Deutsche to test the many universes theory of quantum physics.
| wasabi991011 wrote:
| You've mentioned this in another comment. I have to point
| out, even if this is his opinion, and he has been influential
| in the field, it does not mean that this specific idea of his
| has been influential.
| hshshshshsh wrote:
| Sorry. I don't care whether an idea was influential or not.
| All I care is whether someone has a better explanation.
| wasabi991011 wrote:
| I'll remind you of the quote that started this thread:
|
| "Do quantum computing folks really think that we are
| borrowing capacity from other universes for these
| calculations?"
|
| In this context, your opinion and Deutsch's opinion don't
| matter. The question is about whether the idea is common
| in the field or not.
| hshshshshsh wrote:
| Okay. I just don't understand. Are you saying Quantum
| Computers are also implemented without assuming the
| computations run in parallel universe?
| Vecr wrote:
| I don't know what he's saying, but I'm saying that the
| answer to your question is "Yes," unless quantum
| computers behave differently than expected.
| wasabi991011 wrote:
| Correct. The laws of quantum mechanics (used for building
| quantum computers among other things) make very little
| assumptions on the nature of the universe, and support
| multiple interpretations, many-worlds being only one of
| them.
|
| Quantum mechanics is a tool to calculate observable
| values, and this tool works very successfully without
| needing to make strong assumptions about the nature of
| the universe.
| Vegenoid wrote:
| It is not useful to spam this comment repeatedly under
| different people who question or disagree with many worlds.
| Pick one place to make your case.
| killerstorm wrote:
| Everett interpretation simply asserts that quantum
| wavefunctions are real and there's no such thing as
| "wavefunction collapse". It's the simplest interpretation.
|
| People call it "many worlds" because we can interact only with
| a tiny fraction of the wavefunction at a time, i.e. other
| "branches" which are practically out of reach might be
| considered "parallel universes".
|
| But it would be more correct to say that it's just one universe
| which is much more complex than what it looks like to our eyes.
| Quantum computers are able to tap into this complexity. They
| make a more complete use of the universe we are in.
| layer8 wrote:
| The Schrodinger equation inherently contains a multiverse. The
| disagreement is about whether the wave function described by
| the equation collapses to a single universe upon measurement
| (i.e. whether the equation stops holding upon measurement), or
| whether the different branches continue to exist (i.e. the
| equation continues to hold at all times), each with a different
| measurement outcome. Regardless, between measurements the
| different branches exist in parallel. It's what allows quantum
| computation to be a thing.
| Lionga wrote:
| Non of that honkey ponkey is needed if you just give up
| locality and a hard deterministic explanation like De-
| Broglie-Bohm gives all the same correct measurements and
| conclusions like Copenhagen interpretation without
| multiverses and "wave function collapses".
|
| Copenhagen interpretation is just "easier" (like oops all our
| calculations about the univers don't seemt to fit, lets
| invent "dark matter") when the correct explanations makes any
| real world calculation practically impossible (thus ending
| most of physics further study) as any atom depends on every
| other atom at any time.
| layer8 wrote:
| De Broglie-Bohm doesn't remove anything from the wave
| function, and thus all the pointer states therein contained
| are still present. The theory basically claims that one of
| them is special and _really_ exists, whereas the others
| only mathematically exist, but philosophically it's not
| clear what the difference would be. The Broglie-Bohm
| ontology is bigger than MW rather than smaller.
| wasabi991011 wrote:
| > The Schrodinger equation inherently contains a multiverse.
|
| A simple counterexample is superdeterminism, in which the
| different measurement outcomes are an illusion and instead
| there is always a single pre-determined measurement outcome.
| Note that this does not violate Bell's inequality for hidden
| variable theories of quantum mechanics, as Bell's inequality
| only applies to hidden variables uncorrelated to the choice
| of measurement: in superdeterminism, both are predetermined
| so perfectly correlated.
| creata wrote:
| > The Schrodinger equation inherently contains a multiverse.
|
| Just to be clear, where in the Schrodinger equation (ihps =
| Hps) is the "multiverse"?
| layer8 wrote:
| When taking the entire universe as a quantum system
| governed by the Schrodinger equation, then ps is the
| universal wavefunction, and its state vector can be
| decomposed into pointer states that represent the
| "branches" of MW.
| varjag wrote:
| Yes this is deeply unserious tangent in supposedly landmark
| technology announcement.
| athesyn wrote:
| It's just marketing.
| varjag wrote:
| Oh, are they selling these?
| mrguyorama wrote:
| "Just marketing" in science journalism and publications is
| basically at the root of the anti-intellectualism movement
| right now (other than the standard hyper-fundamentalist
| Christians that need to convince people that science in
| general is all fraud), everyone sees all these wild claims
| and conclusions made by "science journalists" with zero
| scientific training and literal university PR departments
| that are trivially disproved in the layman's mind simply by
| the fact that they don't happen, and they lose faith not in
| the journalists who have no idea what they are writing
| about, but in _science itself_
|
| I used to love Popular Science magazine in middle school,
| but by high school I had noticed how much it's claims were
| hyperbole and outright nonsense. I can't fathom how or why,
| but most people blame the scientists for it.
|
| Puffery is not a victimless crime.
| qnleigh wrote:
| This is a viable interpretation of quantum mechanics, but
| currently there is no way to scientifically falsify or confirm
| any particular interpretation. The boundary between philosophy
| and science is fuzzy at times, but this question is solidly on
| the side of philosophy.
|
| That being said, I think the two most commonly preferred
| interpretations of quantum mechanics among physicists are 'Many
| Worlds' and 'I try not to think about it too hard.'
| m3kw9 wrote:
| So are we now concerned with the environment of another
| universe? Like climate activitist but for multiverses?
| whoitwas wrote:
| Well. If you study quantum physics and the folks who found it
| like Max Planck, they believed in "a conscious and intelligent
| non-visible living energy force .. . the matrix mind of all
| matter".
|
| I don't know much about multiverse, but we need something
| external to explain the magic we uncover.
|
| Energy and quantum mechanics are really cool but dense to get
| into. Like Planck, I suspect there's a link between
| consciousness and matter. I also think our energy doesn't cease
| to exist when our human carcass expires.
| htrp wrote:
| 105 qubits
| wslh wrote:
| ELI5: what I could do if I have this chip at home?
| wrsh07 wrote:
| Probably just research on quantum computers? I don't think it's
| big enough to let you solve any practical problems, but maybe
| someone can correct me
| d3m0t3p wrote:
| IF (and that's a big if) that's true then it means they can
| factorize number into primes with this quantum computer and
| break encryption.
| Ar-Curunir wrote:
| No, this quantum computer cannot factorize the large
| composite numbers that we use for modern RSA. Even for the
| numbers that it _can_ factor, I don 't think it will be
| faster than a decent classical computer.
| wasabi991011 wrote:
| No, that's not what that means.
|
| Not sure what you mean by the "that" when you say "if
| that's true", but there is nothing in this thread or by
| google that is anywhere close to breaking encryption.
| bluSCALE4 wrote:
| How are you so sure? If something that takes years is
| completed in minutes, how is encryption safe?
| shawabawa3 wrote:
| The amount of cubits required for a practical application
| of shors algorithm to break modern encryption is known
| and it's around 2500 qubits
|
| Willow has 100
| wasabi991011 wrote:
| Because the "something" in question is not decryption.
| It's actually specifically something with no useful
| result, just a benchmark.
|
| Decryption with quantum computers is still likely decades
| away, as others have pointed out.
|
| To be specific, the best know quantum factoring did 15 =
| 3x5, and when 35 was not able to be factored when
| attempted. Most experimental demonstrations have stopped
| in recent years due to how pointless it currently is.
| readyplayernull wrote:
| > It lends credence to the notion that quantum computation occurs
| in many parallel universes, in line with the idea that we live in
| a multiverse, a prediction first made by David Deutsch.
|
| Processing in multiverse. Would that mean we are inyecting
| entropy into those other verses? Could we calculate how many are
| there from the time it takes to do a given calculation? We need
| to cool the quantum chip in our universe, how are the (n-1)verses
| cooling on their end?
| deanCommie wrote:
| What if we are? And by injecting entropy into it, we are
| actually hurrying (in small insignificant ways) the heat death
| of those universes? What if we keep going and scale out and in
| the future it causes a meaningful impact to that universe in a
| way that it's residents would be extremely unhappy with, and
| would want to take revenge?
|
| What if it's already happening to our universe? And that is
| what black holes are? Or other cosmology concepts we don't
| understand?
|
| Maybe a great filter is your inability to protect your universe
| from quantum technology from elsewhere in the multiverse
| ripping yours up?
|
| Maybe the future of sentience isn't fighting for resources on a
| finite planet, or consuming the energy of stars, but fighting
| against other multiverses.
|
| Maybe The Dark Forest Defence is a decision to isolate your
| universe from the multiverse - destroying it's ability to
| participate in quantum computation, but also extending it's
| lifespan.
|
| (I don't believe ANY of this, but I'm just noting the
| fascinating science fiction storylines available)
| navaati wrote:
| Getting strong vibes of Asimov's novel "The Gods Themselves"
| here ! For those who haven't read it I recommend it. It's a
| nice little self-contained book, not a grandiose series and
| universe, but I love it.
| demaga wrote:
| This is exactly it, love that book.
| kridsdale1 wrote:
| I'd say it's more akin to Dark Energy than anything Black
| Hole related.
|
| DE is some sort of entropy that is being added to our cosmos
| in an exponential way over historic time. It began at a point
| a few billion in to our history.
| Willish42 wrote:
| Thanks for throwing in references like
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_forest_hypothesis even
| though this was a silly response to the science fiction
| implications.
|
| I found it an interesting read and hadn't heard the term
| before, but it's exactly the kind of nerdy serendipity I come
| to this site for!
| jsvlrtmred wrote:
| AFAIK a fundamental step in any quantum computing algorithm is
| bringing the qubits back to a state with a nonrandom outcome
| (specifically, the answer to the problem being solved). Thus a
| "good" quantum computer does not bifurcate the wavefunction at
| a macro level, ie there is no splitting of the "multiverse"
| after the calculation.
| thrance wrote:
| The many-worlds interpretation of quantum theory [1] is widely
| considered unfalsifiable and therefore mostly pseudoscientific.
| This article is way in over it's head in claiming such
| nonsense.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Many-worlds_interpretation
| zarzavat wrote:
| That depends on whether you think that MWI is making claims
| beyond what QM claims, or if you think that MWI is just a
| restatement of QM from another perspective. If the latter
| then the falsifiability of MWI is exactly the same as the
| falsifiability of QM itself.
| newsbinator wrote:
| Unfalsifiable does not mean pseudoscientific. Plenty of
| things might be unfalsifiable for humans (e.g. humans lack
| the cognitive capacity to conceive of ways to falsify them),
| but then easily falsifiable for whatever comes after humans.
| akira2501 wrote:
| Isn't it really just processing with matrices of imaginary
| numbers? Which is why you need error correction in the first
| place because the higher temperature the system the less
| coherent the phases all become? Thus having absolutely nothing
| to do with multiverse theory?
|
| I think string theories ideas about extra curled up dimensions
| are far more likely places to look. You've already got an
| infinite instantaneous energy problem with multiverses let
| alone entropy transfer considerations.
| ipsum2 wrote:
| They renamed quantum supremacy to "beyond-classical"? That's
| something.
| maxboone wrote:
| https://arxiv.org/abs/1705.06768
|
| It's not something that new, I like it.
| sdenton4 wrote:
| Quantum supremacy was an absolutely awful name for what it was
| (ability to do something, anything, better than a classical
| computer, which remains 'supreme' on all problems of any
| practical interest).
| airstrike wrote:
| Sure, but it sounded much cooler
| Mistletoe wrote:
| In what ways could Google monetize quantum computing?
| michaelt wrote:
| Searching through an unstructured data set of size N on a
| classical computer takes O(N) time
|
| but on a quantum computer, Grover's Algorithm allows such a
| search to be performed in O(N^0.5) time.
|
| So Quantum Computing, could bring us a future where, when you
| perform a Google search for a word, the web pages returned
| actually contain the word you searched for.
| _benj wrote:
| > So Quantum Computing, could bring us a future where, when
| you perform a Google search for a word, the web pages
| returned actually contain the word you searched for.
|
| Lol! I'm not gonna put a kagi plug here...
| 7e wrote:
| Quantum mechanics is a computational shortcut that makes our
| simulation cost-effective. Mass adoption of chips like these is
| going to make the particular situation we live in unprofitable
| for hosts, resulting in the firey and dramatic end of the world
| for us. Simulating ancestors is fun, but not after your cloud
| bill skyrockets. Thank you, Google, for bringing about the
| apocalypse.
| vessenes wrote:
| I'm a quantum dabbler so I'll throw out an armchair reaction:
| this is a significant announcement.
|
| My memory is that 256 bit keys in non quantum resistant algos
| need something like 2500 qubits or so; and by that I mean
| generally useful programmable qubits. To show a bit over 100
| qubits with stability, meaning the information survives a while,
| long enough to be read, and general enough to run some benchmarks
| on is something many people thought might never come.
|
| There's a sort of religious reaction people have to quantum
| computing: it breaks so many things that I think a lot of people
| just like to assume it won't happen: too much in computing and
| data security will change -> let's not worry about it.
|
| Combined with the slow pace of physical research progress
| (Schorrs algorithm for quantum factoring was mid 90s), and snake
| oil sales companies, it's easy to ignore.
|
| Anyway seems like the clock might be ticking; AI and data
| security will be unalterably different if so. Worth spending a
| little time doing some long tail strategizing I'd say.
| goatking wrote:
| How can I, a regular software engineer, learn about quantum
| computing without having to learn quantum theory?
|
| > Worth spending a little time doing some long tail
| strategizing I'd say
|
| any tips for starters?
| sshb wrote:
| Might be worth checking out: https://quantum.country/
| zitterbewegung wrote:
| I recommend this book I studied it in Undergrad and I never
| took a quantum theory course. https://www.amazon.com/Quantum-
| Computing-Computer-Scientists...
| raidicy wrote:
| Are there any insights that you can give based off the info
| you've learned about quantum computation that you might not
| have been able to reach if you hadn't learned about it?
|
| From my __very__ shallow understanding, because all of the
| efficiency increases are in very specific areas, it might
| not be useful for the average computer science interested
| individual?
| zitterbewegung wrote:
| Nearly all of quantum computation is theoretical
| algorithms and the hard engineering problems haven't been
| solved. Most of the math though has a large amount of
| overlap of AI / ML and all of deep learning to the point
| that Quantum computers could be used as "ML accelerators"
| by using algorithms (this is called Quantum Machine
| learning) [1]. Quantum computing could be learned with a
| limited understanding of Quantum theory unless you are
| trying to engineer the hardware.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_machine_learning
| kvathupo wrote:
| Possibly of interest, but I wrote a (hopefully
| approachable) report on quantum perceptrons a few years
| back [1]. Perhaps it's found elsewhere, but I was
| surprised by how, at least in this quantum algo's case,
| the basis of training was game theoretic not gradient
| descent!
|
| [1] - https://kvathupo.github.io/cs/quantum/457_Final_Rep
| ort.pdf
| potsandpans wrote:
| Start here: https://youtu.be/F_Riqjdh2oM
|
| You don't need to know quantum theory necessarily, but you
| will need to know some maths. Specifically linear algebra.
|
| There are a few youtube courses on linear algebra
|
| For a casual set of video: - https://youtube.com/playlist?lis
| t=PLZHQObOWTQDPD3MizzM2xVFit...
|
| For a more formal approach:
|
| - https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL49CF3715CB9EF31D
|
| And the corresponding open courseware
|
| - https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/18-06-linear-algebra-
| spring-2010...
|
| Linear algebra done right comes highly recommended
|
| - https://linear.axler.net/
| RossBencina wrote:
| +1 for 18-06 and Axler. Another, more concrete, option (not
| sure how much it will help with quantum theory) is Stephen
| Boyd's "Introduction to Applied Linear Algebra" available
| online here:
|
| https://web.stanford.edu/~boyd/vmls/
| pagekicker wrote:
| Isn't there a Python library that abstracts most of it away
| with a couple of gigantic classes with incompatible
| dependencies?
| jvanderbot wrote:
| There is a course mentioned in the article, but I'm not clear
| on how "theory" it is.
|
| https://coursera.org/learn/quantum-error-correction
| carabiner wrote:
| First learn about eigenvalues.
| billti wrote:
| If you're a software engineer, then the Quantum Katas might
| fit your learning style. The exercises use Q#, which is
| quantum specific programming language.
|
| https://quantum.microsoft.com/en-us/tools/quantum-katas
|
| The first few lessons do cover complex numbers and linear
| algebra, so skip ahead if you want to get straight to the
| 'quantum' coding, but there's really no escaping the math if
| you really want to learn quantum.
|
| Disclaimer: I work in the Azure Quantum team on our Quantum
| Development Kit (https://github.com/microsoft/qsharp) -
| including Q#, the Katas, and our VS Code extension. Happy to
| answer any other questions on it.
| auto wrote:
| Is there a reasonable pivot for someone well versed in the
| software engineering space to get in, or is it still the
| playground of relevant Ph.Ds and the like? I've been up and
| down the stack from firmware to the cloud, going on 14
| years in the industry, have a Master's in CS, am the
| technical lead for a team, yada yada, but have been
| flirting with the idea of getting out of standard product
| development and back into the nitty gritty of the space I
| first pursued during undergrad.
| almostgotcaught wrote:
| > Is there a reasonable pivot for someone well versed in
| the software engineering space to get in, or is it still
| the playground of relevant Ph.Ds and the like?
|
| there's no such thing as a practical QC and there won't
| be for decades. this isn't a couple of years away - this
| is "maybe, possibly, pretty please, if we get lucky"
| 25-50 years away. find the above comment that alludes to
| "2019 estimates needing ~20 million physical qubits" and
| consider that this thing has 105 physical qubits. then
| skim the posted article and find this number
|
| > the key quantum computational resource -- are now
| approaching 100 us (microseconds)
|
| that's how long those 105 physical qubits stay coherent
| for. now ponder your career pivot.
|
| source: i dabbled during my PhD - took a couple of
| classes from Fred Chong, wrote a paper - it's all hype.
| kvathupo wrote:
| The bar for entry is surprisingly low, you just need to brush
| up on intro abstract algebra. I recommend the following:
|
| 1. Kaye, LaFlamme, and Mosca - An Introduction to Quantum
| Computing
|
| 2. Nielsen and Chuang - Quantum Computation and Quantum
| Information (The Standard reference source)
|
| 3. Andrew Childs's notes here [1]. Closest to the state-of-
| the-art, at least circa ~3 years ago.
|
| [1] - https://www.cs.umd.edu/~amchilds/qa/
| neoden wrote:
| These lessons might be of help:
| https://youtu.be/3-c4xJa7Flk?si=krrpXMKh3X5ktrzT
| currymj wrote:
| specifically avoid resources written by and for physicists.
|
| the model of quantum mechanics, if you can afford to ignore
| any real-world physical system and just deal with abstract
| |0>, |1> qubits, is relatively easy. (this is really funny
| given how incredibly difficult actual quantum physics can
| be.)
|
| you have to learn basic linear algebra with complex numbers
| (can safely ignore anything really gnarly).
|
| then you learn how to express Boolean circuits in terms of
| different matrix multiplications, to capture classical
| computation in this model. This should be pretty easy if you
| have a software engineer's grasp of Boolean logic.
|
| Then you can learn basic ideas about entanglement, and a few
| of the weird quantum tricks that make algorithms like Shor
| and Grover search work. Shor's algorithm may be a little
| mathematically tough.
|
| realistically you probably will never need to know how to
| program a quantum computer even if they become practical and
| successful. applications are powerful but very limited.
|
| "What You Shouldn't Know About Quantum Computers" is a good
| non-mathematical read.
|
| https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.15838
| ajb wrote:
| The simplest algorithm to understand is probably Grover's
| algorithm. Knowing that shows you how to get an sqrt(N)
| speedup on many classical algorithms. Then have a look at
| shor's algorithm which is the classic factoring algorithm.
|
| I would not worry about hardware at first. But if you are
| interested and like physics, the simplest to understand are
| linear optical quantum circuits. These use components which
| may be familiar from high school or undergraduate physics.
| The catch is that the space (and component count) is
| exponential in the number of qubits, hence the need for more
| exotic designs.
| cevi wrote:
| I always recommend Watrous's lecture notes:
| https://cs.uwaterloo.ca/~watrous/QC-notes/QC-notes.pdf
|
| I prefer his explanation to most other explanations because
| he starts, right away, with an analogy to ordinary
| probabilities. It's easy to understand how linear algebra is
| related to probability (a random combination of two outcomes
| is described by linearly combining them), so the fact that we
| represent random states by vectors is not surprising at all.
| His explanation of the Dirac bra-ket notation is also
| extremely well executed. My only quibble is that he doesn't
| introduce density matrices (which in my mind are the correct
| way to understand quantum states) until halfway through the
| notes.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| If you want to learn about what theoretical quantum computers
| might be able to do faster than classical ones and what they
| might not, you can try to read about quantum complexity
| theory, or some of what Scott Aaronson puts out on his blog
| if you don't want to go that in depth.
|
| But the key thing to know about quantum computing is that it
| is all about the mathematical properties of quantum physics,
| such as the way complex probabilities work.
| thrance wrote:
| The error rates given are still horrendous and nowhere near low
| enough for the Quantum Fourier Transform used by Shor's
| algorithm. Taking qubit connectivity into account, a single CX
| between 2 qubits that are 10 edges aways gives an error rate of
| 1.5%.
|
| Also, the more qubits you have/the more instructions are in
| your program, the faster the quantum state collapses.
| Exponentially so. Qubit connectivity is still ridiculously low
| (~3) and does not seem to be improving at all.
|
| About AI, what algorithm(s) do you think might have an edge
| over classical supercomputers in the next 30 years? I'm really
| curious, because to me it's all (quantum) snake oil.
| LeftHandPath wrote:
| Re: AI, it's a long way off still. The big limitation to
| anything quantum is always going to be decoherence and t-time
| [0]. To do anything with ML, you'll need whole circuit (more
| complex than shor's) just to initialize the data on the
| quantum device; the algorithms to do this are complex
| (exponential) [1]. So, you have to run a very expensive data-
| initialization circuit, and only then can you start to run
| your ML circuit. All of this needs to be done within the
| machine's t-time limit. If you exceed that limit, then the
| measured state of a qubit will have more to do with outside-
| world interactions than interactions with your quantum gates.
|
| Google's willow chip has t-times of about 60-100mu.s. That's
| not an impressive figure -- in 2022, IBM announced their
| Eagle chip with t-times of around 400mu.s [2]. Google's angle
| here would be the error correction (EC).
|
| The following portion from Google's announcement seems most
| important:
|
| > With 105 qubits, Willow now has best-in-class performance
| across the two system benchmarks discussed above: quantum
| error correction and random circuit sampling. Such
| algorithmic benchmarks are the best way to measure overall
| chip performance. Other more specific performance metrics are
| also important; for example, our T1 times, which measure how
| long qubits can retain an excitation -- the key quantum
| computational resource -- are now approaching 100 us
| (microseconds). This is an impressive ~5x improvement over
| our previous generation of chips.
|
| Again, as they lead with, their focus here is on error
| correction. I'm not sure how their results compare to
| competitors, but it sounds like they consider that to be the
| biggest win of the project. The RCS metric is interesting,
| but RCS has no (known) practical applications (though it is a
| common benchmark). Their T-times are an improvement over
| older Google chips, but not industry-leading.
|
| I'm curious if EC can mitigate the sub-par decoherence times.
|
| [0]: https://www.science.org/doi/abs/10.1126/science.270.5242
| .163...
|
| [1]: https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.5555/3511065.3511068
|
| [2]: https://www.ibm.com/quantum/blog/eagle-quantum-
| processor-per...
| wasabi991011 wrote:
| > I'm curious if EC can mitigate the sub-par decoherence
| times.
|
| The main EC paper referenced in this blog post showed that
| the logical qubit lifetime using a distance-7 code (all 105
| qubits) was double the lifetime of the physical qubits of
| the same machine.
|
| I'm not sure how lifetime relates to decoherence time, but
| if that helps please let me know.
| LeftHandPath wrote:
| That's very useful, I missed that when I read through the
| article.
|
| If the logical qubit can have double the lifetime of any
| physical qubit, that's massive. Recall IBM's chips, with
| t-times of ~400microseconds. Doubling that would change
| the order of magnitude.
|
| It still won't be enough to do much in the near term -
| like other commenters say, this seems to be a proof of
| concept - but the concept is very promising.
|
| The first company to get there and make their systems
| easy to use could see a similar run up in value to NVIDIA
| after ChatGPT3. IBM seems to be the strongest in the
| space overall, for now.
| deepburner wrote:
| I'm sorry if this is nitpicky but your comment is
| hilarious to me - doubling something is doubling
| something, "changing the order of magnitude" would entail
| multiplication by 10.
| LeftHandPath wrote:
| Hahaha not at all, great catch. Sometimes my gray matter
| just totally craps out... like thinking of "changing
| order of magnitude" as "adding 1 extra digit".
|
| Reminds me of the time my research director pulled me
| aside for defining CPU as "core processing unit" instead
| of "central processing unit" in a paper!
| JanisErdmanis wrote:
| Wouldn't thoose increased decoherence times need to be
| viewed in relation to the time it takes to execute a basic
| gate? If the time to execute a gate also increases it may
| overtake practicality of having less noisy logical qubits.
| AlexCoventry wrote:
| In addition to that, the absolutely enormous domains that the
| Fourier Transform sums over (essentially, one term in the sum
| for each possible answer), and the cancellations which would
| have to occur for that sum to be informative, means that a
| theoretically-capable Quantum Computer will be testing the
| predictions of Quantum Mechanics to a degree of precision
| hundreds of orders of magnitude greater than any physics
| experiment to date. (Or at least dozens of orders of
| magnitude, in the case of breaking Discrete Log on an
| Elliptic Curve.) It demands higher accuracy in the
| probability distributions predicted by QM than could be
| confirmed by naive frequency tests which used the entire
| lifetime of the entire universe as their laboratory!
|
| Imagine a device conceived in the 17th century, the intended
| functionality of which would require a physical sphere which
| matches a perfect, ideal, geometric sphere in Euclidean space
| to thousands of digits of precision. We now know that the
| concept of such a perfect physical sphere is incoherent with
| modern physics in a variety of ways (e.g., atomic basis of
| matter, background gravitational waves.) I strongly suspect
| that the cancellations required for the Fourier Transform in
| Shor's algorithm to be cryptographically relevant will turn
| out to be the moral equivalent of that perfect sphere.
|
| We'll probably learn some new physics in the process of
| trying to build a Quantum Computer, but I highly doubt that
| we'll learn each others' secrets.
| JanisErdmanis wrote:
| Beautiful analogy.
| sesm wrote:
| > Also, the more qubits you have/the more instructions are in
| your program, the faster the quantum state collapses.
|
| Was this actually measured and published somewhere?
| JanisErdmanis wrote:
| The required number of qubits to execute Shor's algorithm is
| way larger than 2500 qubits as the error ceiling for logical
| qubits must decrease exponentially with every logical qubit
| added to produce meaningful results. Hence, repeated
| applications of error correction or an increase in the surface
| code would be required. That would significantly blow up the
| number of physical qubits needed.
| adastra22 wrote:
| He's quoting the number of logical qubits (which is 1024
| IIRC, not 2500), after error correction.
|
| ETA: Wikipedia 2330 qubits, but I'm not sure it is citing the
| most recent work: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elliptic-
| curve_cryptography#ci...
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| 1024 is for RSA-1024, which is believed to be broken by
| classical means at this point. Everyone doing anything with
| RSA is on 4k or larger.
| Vecr wrote:
| They are? The short term recommendation is 3072, and I
| still see lots of 2048. Actually, it's mostly 2048.
| wcoenen wrote:
| > _Everyone doing anything with RSA is on 4k or larger._
|
| The Let's Encrypt intermediate certificates R10 and R11
| seem to be only 2048 bit.
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| A signature (not encryption) with short-term valid life
| is fine at 2048 still.
| adastra22 wrote:
| I took this conversation to be about ECC, not RSA.
| notarealllama wrote:
| My completely unfounded tin foil hat at the moment is
| that ECC was pushed as a standard not because it was
| faster/ smaller, but the smaller bit size makes it less
| quantum resistant and is more prone to be broken first
| (if not already) via quantum supremacy.
| tptacek wrote:
| You're right, that's pretty unfounded.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| ECC is easier to implement right. Even the older ones
| that are full of footguns have orders of magnitude less
| footguns than RSA.
|
| So don't fear them due to unfounded theories.
| anonymoushn wrote:
| Is there consensus on what signature validation is
| correct?
| https://hdevalence.ca/blog/2020-10-04-its-25519am
| marcosdumay wrote:
| IMO, that article has a clear conclusion that you should
| aim your software at the libsodium-1.0.16 pattern (no
| edge cases).
|
| The problem it's presenting is more about software on the
| wild having different behavior... And if "some people
| connect on the internet and use software that behaves
| differently from mine" is a showstopper for you, I have
| some really bad news.
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| Discrete log doesn't use Shor's algorithm, and appears to
| need more qubits to break (per key bit).
| tptacek wrote:
| 2048. There is no plausible conventional attack on 2048;
| whatever breaks 2048 is probably going to break 4096, as
| I understand it.
|
| https://crypto.stackexchange.com/questions/1978/how-big-
| an-r...
| FredF--- wrote:
| Is it broken? Seems still no one solved RSA-1024
| challenge.
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| The state actors aren't going to reveal their
| capabilities by solving an open challenge.
| rob-olmos wrote:
| Reminder to anyone if DKIM keys haven't been rotated in a
| while they might still be 1024. Eg., Google Workspace but
| new keys are 2048 now.
| JanisErdmanis wrote:
| I actually thought the number of logical qubits needed was
| around 20 for factorisation as the state space size is
| 2^(2^n) and hence did not recognise them as the number of
| logical qubits required. It is often misunderstood that
| error correction needs to be done only once, as with
| classical quantum computers, and the numbers would fit
| together with one pass of error correction.
|
| The Shor's algorithm requires binary encoding; hence, 2048
| logical qubits are needed to become a nuance for
| cryptography. This, in turn, means that one will always be
| easily able to run away from a quantum adversary by paying
| a polynomial price on group element computations, whereas a
| classical adversary is exponentially bounded in computation
| time, and a quantum adversary is exponentially bounded with
| a number of physical qubits. Fascinating...
| Strilanc wrote:
| The most recent result on reducing the number of logical
| qubits is [1]. They show how to use residue arithmetic to
| factor n bit numbers using n/2 + o(n) logical qubits (they
| give the example of 1730 qubits to factor a 2048 bit
| number).
|
| [1]: https://eprint.iacr.org/2024/222
| The5thElephant wrote:
| Isn't that what they are claiming is true now? That the
| errors do decrease exponentially with each qubit added?
| JanisErdmanis wrote:
| What they claim is that adding physical qubits reduce error
| rate of the logical qubits exponentially. For the Schor
| algorithm the error rate of the logical qubits must
| decrease exponentially with every single logical qubit
| added to make the system produce meaningful results.
|
| To see how it plays out consider adding a single logical
| qubit. First you need to increase the number of physical
| qubits to accommodate the new logical qubit at the same
| error rate. Then multiply the number of physical qubits to
| accommodate for exponentially decreased error rate which
| would be a constant factor N ( or polynomial but let's keep
| things simple) by which the number of physical qubits need
| to be multiplied to produce a system with one additional
| logical qubit with an error rate to produce meaningful
| results.
|
| To attain 1024 logical qubits for Schor algorithm one would
| need N^1024 physical qubits. The case where N<1 would be
| possible if error would decrease by itself without
| additional error correction.
| isoprophlex wrote:
| Data security okay. But AI? How will that change?
| adastra22 wrote:
| AI is essentially search. Quantum computers are really good
| at search.
| sheeshkebab wrote:
| Search of what?
| roywiggins wrote:
| Latent space?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latent_space
| adastra22 wrote:
| Anything. Everything. In domains where the search space
| is small enough to physically enumerate and store or
| evaluate every option, search is commonly understood as a
| process solved by simple algorithms. In domains where the
| search space is too large to physically realize or index,
| search becomes "intelligence."
|
| E.g. winning at Chess or Go (traditional AI domains) is
| searching through the space of possible game states to
| find a most-likely-to-win path.
|
| E.g. an LLM chat application is searching through
| possible responses to find one which best correlates with
| expected answer to the prompt.
|
| With Grover's algorithm, quantum computers let you find
| an answer in any disordered search space with O(sqrt(N))
| operations instead of O(N). That's potentially applicable
| to many AI domains.
|
| But if you're so narrow minded as to only consider
| connectionist / neural network algorithms as "AI", then
| you may be interested to know that quantum linear algebra
| is a thing too:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HHL_algorithm
| cwillu wrote:
| O(sqrt(N)) is easily dominated by the relative ease of
| constructing much bigger classical computers though.
| adastra22 wrote:
| Uh, no? Not for large N.
|
| There are about 2^152 possible legal chess states. You
| cannot build a classical computer large enough to compute
| that many states. Cryptography is generally considered
| secure when it involves a search space of only 2^100
| states.
|
| But you could build a computer to search though
| sqrt(2^152) = 2^76 states. I mean it'd be big--that's on
| the order of total global storage capacity. But not
| "bigger than the universe" big.
| IanCal wrote:
| Doing 2^76 iterations is _huge_. That 's a trillion
| operations a second for two and a half thousand years if
| I've not slipped up and missed a power of ten.
| hatthew wrote:
| Maybe 100 years from now we can do 2^18 quantum ops/sec
| and solve chess in a day, whereas a classical computer
| could do 2^36 ops/sec and still take longer than the
| lifetime of the universe to complete.
| adastra22 wrote:
| Google's SHA-1 collision took 2^63.1 hash operations to
| find. Given that a single hash operation takes more than
| 1000 cycles, that's only less than three doublings away.
|
| Cryptographers worry about big numbers. 2^80 is not
| considered secure.
| IanCal wrote:
| It's early so I'm thinking out loud here but I don't
| think the algorithm scales like this, does it?
|
| We're talking about something that can search a list of
| size N in sqrt(N) iterations. Splitting the problem in
| two doesn't halve the compute required for each half. If
| you had to search 100 items on one machine it's taken 10x
| iterations but split over two it'd take ~7x on each or
| ~14 in total.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| If an algorithm has a complexity class of O(sqrt(N)), by
| definition it means that it can do better if run on all
| 100 elements than by splitting the list into two elements
| and running it on each 50.
|
| This is not at all a surprising property. The same things
| happens with binary search: it has complexity O(log(N)),
| which means that running it on a list of size 1024 will
| take about 10 operations, but running it in parallel on
| two lists of size 512 will take 2 * 9 operations = 18.
|
| This is actually easy to intuit when it comes to search
| problems: the element you're looking for is either in the
| first half of the list or in the second half, it can't be
| in both. So, if you are searching for it in parallel in
| both halves, you'll have to do extra work that just
| wasn't necessary (unless your algorithm is to look at
| every element in order, in which case it's the same).
|
| In the case of binary search, with the very first
| comparison, you can already tell in which half of the
| list your element is: searching the other half is
| pointless. In the case of Grober's algorithm, the
| mechanism is much more complex, but the basic point is
| similar: Grover's algorithm has a way to just not look at
| certain elements of the list, so splitting the list in
| half creates more work overall.
| CJefferson wrote:
| No-one would solve chess by checking every possible legal
| chess state -- also checking 'all the states' wouldn't
| solve chess, you need a sequence of moves, and that
| pushes you up to an even bigger number. But again, you
| can easily massively prune that, as many moves are
| forced, or you can check you are in a provable end-game
| situation.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| That only helps for a relative small range of N. Chess
| happens to sort of fit into this space. Go is way out,
| even a sqrt(N) is still in the "galaxy-sized computer"
| range. So again, there are few problems for which
| Grover's algorithms really takes us from practically
| uncomputable to computable.
|
| Even for chess, 2^76 operations is still waaaaay more
| time than anyone will ever wait for a computation to
| finish, even if we assumed quantum computers could reach
| the OPS of today's best classical computers.
| CJefferson wrote:
| Grover's algorithm is useful for very few things in
| practice, because for most problems we have a better
| technique than checking sqrt(N) of all possible
| solutions, at least heuristicly.
|
| There is, at present, no quantum algorithm which looks
| like it would beat the state of the art on Chess, Go, or
| NP-complete problems in general.
| spencerchubb wrote:
| training an ai model is essentially searching for
| parameters that can make a function really accurate at
| making predictions. in the case of LLMs, they predict
| text.
| cwillu wrote:
| Unstructured search is only a [?]n improvement. You need to
| find some way for algorithmically significant
| interference/cancellation of terms in order for a qc to
| potentially (!) have any benefit.
| numpad0 wrote:
| Aren't quantum computers expected to be like digitally read
| analog computers for high dimension optimization problems,
| and AI is like massive high dimension optimization problems?
| Yoric wrote:
| Google is betting on digital quantum computers.
|
| There are, however, analog quantum computers, e.g. by
| Pasqal, which hope to capitalize on this to optimize AI-
| like high dimension optimization problems.
| gecko22 wrote:
| Why do quantum computers need to be analog to be applied
| to such problems?
| arlort wrote:
| They don't, but if I interpreted the post above correctly
| analog QCs aremuch easier to build
|
| At least as far as I'm aware by digital they probably
| mean a generally programmable QC, whereas another
| approach is to encode a specific class of problems in the
| physical structure of an analog QC so that it solves
| those problems much faster than classical. This latter
| approach is less general (so for instance you won't use
| it to factor primes) but much more attainable. I think
| D-wave or someone like that already had commercial
| application for optimization problems (either traveling
| salesman or something to do with port organization)
| numpad0 wrote:
| But aren't qubits sort of analog? I thought the bits have
| figurative angles of rotation or something continuous
| that would resonate together and/or cancel out like
| neurons in fully-connected parts of neural nets that
| would be read out at the end of the pipeline.
| winwang wrote:
| Edit after skimming arxiv preprint[1]:
|
| Yeah, this is pretty huge. They achieved the result with
| surface codes, which are general ECCs. The repetition code was
| used to further probe quantum ECC floor. "Just POC" likely
| doesn't do it justice.
|
| (Original comment):
|
| Also quantum dabbler (coincidentally dabbled in bitflip quantum
| error correction research). Skimmed the post/research blog. I
| believe the key point is the scaling of error correction via
| repetition codes, would love someone else's viewpoint.
|
| Slightly concerning quote[2]:
|
| """
|
| By running experiments with repetition codes and ignoring other
| error types, we achieve lower encoded error rates while
| employing many of the same error correction principles as the
| surface code. The repetition code acts as an advance scout for
| checking whether error correction will work all the way down to
| the near-perfect encoded error rates we'll ultimately need.
|
| """
|
| I'm getting the feeling that this is more about proof-of-
| concept, rather than near-practicality, but this is certainly
| one fantastic POC if true.
|
| [1]: https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.13687
|
| [2]: https://research.google/blog/making-quantum-error-
| correction...
|
| Relevant quote from preprint (end of section 1, sorry for copy-
| paste artifacts):
|
| """
|
| In this work, we realize surface codes operating below
| threshold on two superconducting processors. Using a 72-qubit
| processor, we implement a distance-5 surface code operating
| with an integrated real-time decoder. In addition, using a
| 105-qubit processor with similar performance, we realize a
| distance-7 surface code. These processors demonstrate L > 2 up
| to distance-5 and distance7, respectively. Our distance-5
| quantum memories are beyond break-even, with distance-7
| preserving quantum information for more than twice as long as
| its best constituent physical qubit. To identify possible
| logical error f loors, we also implement high-distance
| repetition codes on the 72-qubit processor, with error rates
| that are dominated by correlated error events occurring once an
| hour. These errors, whose origins are not yet understood, set a
| current error floor of 10-10. Finally, we show that we can
| maintain below-threshold operation on the 72qubit processor
| even when decoding in real time, meeting the strict timing
| requirements imposed by the processor's fast 1.1us cycle
| duration.
|
| """
| echelon wrote:
| Google could put themselves and everyone else out of business
| if the algorithms that underpin our ability to do e-commerce
| and financial transactions can be defeated.
|
| Goodbye not just to Bitcoin, but also Visa, Stripe, Amazon
| shopping, ...
| mperham wrote:
| Right? Does TLS1.3 have the underpinnings to use quantum-
| proof encryption algos?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-quantum_cryptography
|
| https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/post-
| quantu...
|
| https://www.forbes.com/councils/forbestechcouncil/2024/10/0
| 9...
| bangaladore wrote:
| It seems you can get TLS 1.3 (or atlest slighty modified
| 1.3) to be quantum secure, but it increases the handshake
| size by roughly 9x. Cloudflare unfortunately didn't
| mention much about the other downsides though.
|
| https://blog.cloudflare.com/kemtls-post-quantum-tls-
| without-...
| bwesterb wrote:
| About one third of traffic with Cloudflare is already
| using post-quantum encryption.
| https://x.com/bwesterb/status/1866459174697050145
|
| Signatures still have to be upgraded, but that's more
| difficult. We're working on it.
| http://blog.cloudflare.com/pq-2024/#migrating-the-
| internet-t...
| SAI_Peregrinus wrote:
| Yes-ish. They're not enabled yet, but post-quantum
| signatures & KEMs are available in some experimental
| versions of TLS. None are yet standardized, but I'd
| expect a final version well before QCs can actually break
| practical signatures or key exchanges.
| bwesterb wrote:
| One third of all human traffic with Cloudflare is using a
| post-quantum KEM. I'd say that counts as enabled. We want
| that to be 100% of course. Chrome (and derivates) enabled
| PQ by default. https://radar.cloudflare.com/adoption-and-
| usage
| bluSCALE4 wrote:
| Why is no one else talking about this? I came here to see a
| discussion about this and encryption.
| wasabi991011 wrote:
| Because this result is still very far from anything
| related to practical decryption.
| jgalt212 wrote:
| And if they were, would they tell the world?
| tsimionescu wrote:
| If they had a QC that could run Shor's algorithm to
| factor the number 1000, I'd guarantee you they'd tell the
| whole world. And it would still be a long, _long_ time
| from there to having a QC that can factor 2048-bit
| numbers.
| shriphani wrote:
| bitcoin proof of work is not as impacted by quantum
| computers - grover's algorithm provides a quadratic speedup
| for unstructured search - so SHA256 ends up with 128 bits
| of security for pre-image resistance. BTC can easily move
| to SHA512.
|
| symmetric ciphers would have similar properties (AES,
| CHACHA20). Asymmetric encryption atm would use ECDH (which
| breaks) to generate a key for use with symmetric ciphers -
| Kyber provides a PQC KEM for this.
|
| So, the situation isn't as bad. We're well positioned in
| cryptography to handle a PQC world.
| qnleigh wrote:
| It's currently believed that quantum computers cannot break
| all forms of public key cryptography. Lattice based
| cryptography is a proposed replacement to RSA that would
| let us keeping buying things online no problem.
| wasabi991011 wrote:
| You got the main idea, it's a proof-of-concept: that a class
| of error-correcting code on real physical quantum chips obey
| the threshold theorem, as is expected based on theory and
| simulations.
|
| However the main scaling of error correction is via surface
| codes, not repetition codes. It's an important point as
| surface codes correct all Pauli errors, not just either bit-
| flips or phase-flips.
|
| They use repetition codes as a diagnostic method in this
| paper more than anything, it is not the main result.
|
| In particular, I interpret the quote you used as: "We want to
| scale surface codes even more, and if we were able to do the
| same scaling with surface codes as we are able to do with
| repetition codes, then this is the behaviour we would
| expect."
|
| Edit: Welp, saw your edit, you came to the same conclusion
| yourself in the time it took me to write my comment.
| winwang wrote:
| Haha, classic race condition, but I appreciate your take
| nonetheless!
| bee_rider wrote:
| I think some element of it might be: Shor's algorithm has been
| known of for 30 years, and hypothetically could be used to
| decrypt captured communications, right? So, retroactively I
| will have been dumb for not having switched to a quantum-
| resistant scheme. And, dumb in a way that a bunch of academic
| nerds have been pointing out for decades.
|
| That level of embarrassment is frankly difficult to face. And
| it would be devastating to the self-image of a bunch of
| "practical" security gurus.
|
| Therefore any progress must be an illusion. In the real world,
| the threats are predictable and mistakes don't slowly snowball
| into a crisis. See also, infrastructure.
| adastra22 wrote:
| What would you switch to? There hasn't been post quantum
| systems to use until very very recently.
| bawolff wrote:
| All you encrypted communication from the 90s (SSL anyways)
| can probably be decrypted with classical means anyways. 90s
| SSL was pretty bad.
| cherryteastain wrote:
| > AI and data security will be unalterably different if so
|
| Definitely agree with the latter, but do you have any sources
| on how quantum comphters make "AI" (i.e. matrix multiplication)
| faster?
| meta_x_ai wrote:
| Exploring via Search can become O(1) instead of M^N
| bawolff wrote:
| That is definitely not true.
| npalli wrote:
| > Worth spending a little time doing some long tail
| strategizing I'd say.
|
| Yup, like Bitcoin going to zero.
| drcode wrote:
| eh, they will add a quantum-resistant signature scheme
| (already a well-understood thing) then people can transfer
| their funds to the new addresses before it is viable to crack
| the existing addresses
| bangaladore wrote:
| So the first company that can break bitcoin addresses using
| quantum computers gets a prize of how many billion(?)
| dollars by stealing all the non-migrated addresses.
|
| Is that a crime? Lots of forgotten keys in there.
| webXL wrote:
| A very interesting philosophical and moral can of worms
| you just opened there. Bitcoin is governed by the
| protocol, so if the protocol permits anyone who can sign
| a valid transaction involving a given UTXO to another
| address, then it technically isn't a "crime". Morally I'm
| not sure I'd be able to sleep well at night if I
| unilaterally took what I didn't exchange value for.
|
| As for the forgotten key case, I think the only way to
| prove you had the key at some point would need to involve
| the sender vouching for you and cryptographically proving
| they were the sender.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| Morally, there is no quandary: it's obviously morally
| wrong to take someone else's things, and knowing their
| private key changes nothing.
|
| Legally, the situation is the same: legal ownership is
| not in any way tied to the mechanism of how some system
| or another keeps track of ownership. Your BTC is yours
| via a contract, not because the BTC network says so. Of
| course, proving to a judge that someone else stole your
| BTC may be extremely hard, if not impossible.
|
| Saying "if the protocol permits anyone who can sign a
| valid transaction involving a given UTXO to another
| address, then it technically isn't a "crime"" is like
| saying "traditional banking is governed by a banker
| checking your identity, so if someone can convince the
| banker they are you, then it technically isn't a
| "crime"".
|
| The only thing that wouldn't be considered a crime, in
| both cases, is the system allowing the transaction to
| happen. That is, it's not a crime for the bank teller to
| give your money to someone else if they were legitimately
| fooled; and it's not a crime for the Bitcoin miners to
| give your money to someone else if that someone else
| impersonated your private key. But the person who fooled
| the bank teller /the miners is definitely committing a
| crime.
| K0balt wrote:
| I think you're going to need about 10,000,000 qbits to divert
| a transaction, but that's still within foreseeable scale. I
| think it's extreme likely that the foundation will have
| finished their quantum resistance planning before we get to
| 10MM coherent qbits, but still, it's a potential scenario.
|
| More likely that other critical infrastructure failures will
| happen within trad-finance, much larger vulnerability
| footprint, and being able to trivially reverse engineer every
| logged SSL session is likely to be a much more impactful turn
| of events. I'd venture that there are significant ear-on-the-
| wire efforts going on right now in anticipation of a
| reasonable bulk SSL de cloaking solution. Right now we think
| it doesn't matter who can see our "secure" traffic. I think
| that is going to change, retroactively, in a big way.
| vessenes wrote:
| I agree that the scary scenario is stored SSL frames from
| 20 years of banking. That's nuclear meltdown scenarios.
| K0balt wrote:
| It is.. and I don't see a way to avoid it.
| kdmtctl wrote:
| To do what? Replay? Just curious on an attack vector.
| K0balt wrote:
| Hopefully replay attacks will not be useful, but
| confidential information will be abundant. There will be
| actionable information mixed in there , and it will be a
| lot of data. Just imagine if everything whispered
| suddenly became shouted.
| sekai wrote:
| > Yup, like Bitcoin going to zero.
|
| If the encryption on Bitcoin is broken, say goodbye to the
| banking system.
| nadahalli wrote:
| [pedantic hat on] Bitcoin doesn't use encryption.
|
| You mean digital signatures - and yes, we use signatures
| everywhere in public key cryptography.
| socks wrote:
| not really. banking systems have firewalls and access
| controls. quantum computations would be useless.
| webXL wrote:
| Those don't really mean anything when an attacker can
| eavesdrop on customer and employee comms and possibly
| redirect transactions (MITM).
| kelnos wrote:
| Banking communications and transactions will all be
| protected by quantum-resistant protocols and ciphers well
| before that will become a problem. Most of these already
| exist, and some of them can even be deployed.
| vessenes wrote:
| I'm a _little_ more in my wheelhouse here -- without an algo
| change, Grover 's algorithm would privilege quantum miners
| significantly, but not any more than the industry has seen in
| the last 13 years (C code on CPU -> GPU -> Large Geometry
| ASIC -> Small Geometry ASIC are similarly large shifts in
| economics for miners probably).
|
| As to faking signatures and, e.g. stealing Satoshi's coins or
| just fucking up the network with fake transactions that
| verify, there is some concern and there are some attack
| vectors that work well if you have a large, fast quantum
| computer and want to ninja in. Essentially you need something
| that can crack a 256 bit ECDSA key before a block that
| includes a recently released public key can be inverted.
| That's definitely out of the reach of anyone right now, much
| less persistent threat actors, much less hacker hobbyists.
|
| But it won't always be. The current state of the art plan
| would be to transition to a quantum-resistant UTXO format,
| and I would imagine, knowing how Bitcoin has managed itself
| so far, that will be a well-considered, very safe, multi-year
| process, and it will happen with plenty of time.
| ravenhappy wrote:
| You fool! And I say that affectionately. Another fool says:
| the security of Bitcoin relies on the inability to (among
| other things) derive a private key from a public key. This
| is just basic cryptography, like Turning vs enigma. This
| machine can "calculate" solutions to problems in time
| frames that break the whole way that cryptocurrency works.
| You better believe that what we hear about is old. These
| types of systems, and there must be non-public versions,
| could solve a private key from a public key, in easy less
| than O(fu) time.
|
| EDIT: it's like rainbow hashes, but every possible
| variation is a color, not granular like binary, but all and
| any are included.
| m101 wrote:
| Bitcoin will just fork to a quantum proof encryption scheme
| and there will be something called "bitcoin classic" that is
| the old protocol (which few would care about)
| qnleigh wrote:
| You need to distinguish between "physical qubits" and "logical
| qubits." This paper creates a single "first-of-a-kind" logical
| qubit with about 100 physical qubits (using Surface Code
| quantum error correction). A paper from Google in 2019
| estimates needing ~20 million physical qubits ("How to factor
| 2048 bit RSA integers in 8 hours using 20 million noisy qubits"
| - https://arxiv.org/abs/1905.09749), though recent advances
| probably brought this number down a bit. That's because to run
| Shor's algorithm at a useful scale, you need a few thousand
| very high quality logical qubits.
|
| So despite this significant progress, it's probably a still a
| while until RSA is put out of the job. That being said, quantum
| computers would be able to retroactively break any public keys
| that were stored, so there's a case to be made for switching to
| quantum-resistant cryptography (like lattice-based
| cryptography) sooner rather than later.
| rhubarbtree wrote:
| This is correct. I worked in quantum research a little.
| orliesaurus wrote:
| any books for beginners that you recommend?
| macrolime wrote:
| https://quantum.country/qcvc
| sebastialonso wrote:
| This is an outstanding resource, thanks!
| ozzsama wrote:
| Dear rhubarbtree,
|
| I'm very sorry to admit it but I'm too lazy to read the
| entire discussion in this thread. Could you please tell me,
| a mere mortal, at which point the humanity should start
| worrying about the security of asymmetric encryption in the
| brave new world of quantum computing?
| rhaps0dy wrote:
| Thank you for the explanation. It's still an upwards update
| on the qubit timelines of https://arxiv.org/pdf/2009.05045
| (see Fig. 7), but not by an insane amount. We've realized
| their 95% expectation of qubit progress (1 logical qubit) for
| 2026, in 2024.92 instead.
|
| Which to be clear is quite a bit faster than expected in
| 2020, but still within the realm of plausible stuff.
| qnleigh wrote:
| Nice, thanks for linking that paper. I also did below.
|
| The authors argue (e.g. in the first comment here
| https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=8310#comments) that by their
| definition, Google still only has a fraction of one logical
| qubit. Their logical error rate is of order 1e-3, whereas
| this paper considers a logical qubit to have error of order
| 1e-18. Google's breakthrough here is to show that the
| logical error rate can be reduced exponentially as they
| make the system larger, but there is still a lot of scaling
| work to do to reach 1e-18.
|
| So according to this paper, we are still on roughly the
| same track that they laid out, and therefore might expect
| to break RSA between 2040 and 2060. Note that there are
| likely a lot of interesting things one can do before
| breaking RSA, which is among the hardest quantum algorithms
| to run.
| kortilla wrote:
| > quantum computers would be able to retroactively break any
| public keys that were stored
|
| Use a key exchange that offers perfect forward secrecy (e.g.
| diffie Hellman) and you don't need to worry about your RSA
| private key eventually being discovered.
| HeatrayEnjoyer wrote:
| Not exactly, they can just reverse the entire chain.
| kortilla wrote:
| What chain are you talking about?
| ReptileMan wrote:
| Perfect forward secrecy doesn't work that well when NSA
| motto is - store everything now decrypt later. If they
| intercept the ephemeral key exchange now they can decrypt
| the message 10 or 50 years later.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Something tells me that by the end of the century only
| the one-time pads will still be holding their secrets.
| FredPret wrote:
| Even for that to work you need a good random number
| generator
| adgjlsfhk1 wrote:
| That's pretty trivial. xor a video camera with AES and no
| one is decrypting that ever.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| And, famously, the camera is pointing at a lava lamp, ha
| ha.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Honestly not sure how they created one-time pads 100
| years ago.
| rdtsc wrote:
| In one case it was people just banging on typewriters
| randomly.
| kortilla wrote:
| Diffie Hellman doesn't ever send the key over the wire,
| that's the point. There is nothing to decrypt in the
| packets that tells you the key both sides derived.
|
| Unless they break ECDHE, it doesn't matter if RSA gets
| popped.
| bsaul wrote:
| wouldn't be surprised if ecdhe isn't quantum resistant.
| ReptileMan wrote:
| Diffie Hellman to the best of my understanding also
| relies on the same hard problems that make the public key
| cryptography possible. If you trivialize factoring of big
| numbers, you break both RSA and the original DHE. Not
| sure how it will work for elliptic curves, but my
| instinct tells me that if you make the fundamental ECC
| problem easy, the exchange will also go down.
| Thorrez wrote:
| According to the top image on the Wikipedia page, Diffie
| Hellman does send the public key over the wire.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffie%E2%80%93Hellman_key_
| exc...
| dathery wrote:
| Diffie-Hellman isn't considered to be post-quantum safe: ht
| tps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shor%27s_algorithm#Feasibility.
| ..
| lxgr wrote:
| Forward secrecy is orthogonal to post-quantum safety.
| ramchip wrote:
| > Forward secrecy is designed to prevent the compromise of
| a long-term secret key from affecting the confidentiality
| of past conversations. However, forward secrecy cannot
| defend against a successful cryptanalysis of the underlying
| ciphers being used, since a cryptanalysis consists of
| finding a way to decrypt an encrypted message without the
| key, and forward secrecy only protects keys, not the
| ciphers themselves.[8] A patient attacker can capture a
| conversation whose confidentiality is protected through the
| use of public-key cryptography and wait until the
| underlying cipher is broken (e.g. large quantum computers
| could be created which allow the discrete logarithm problem
| to be computed quickly). This would allow the recovery of
| old plaintexts even in a system employing forward secrecy.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forward_secrecy#Attacks
| kortilla wrote:
| I'm talking specifically about RSA being eventually
| broken. If just RSA is broken and you were using ECDHE
| for symmetric keying, then you're fine.
|
| The point is that you can build stuff on top of RSA today
| even if you expect it to be broken eventually if RSA is
| only for identity verification.
| minitech wrote:
| The relevant RSA break is sufficiently powerful quantum
| computers, which also break ECDH (actually, ECDH is
| easier than classically equivalent-strength RSA for
| quantum computers[1]), so no, you're not fine.
|
| [1]
| https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/33069/why-
| is-ec...
| coppsilgold wrote:
| I would actually expect RSA to see a resurgence due to
| this. Especially because you can technically scale RSA to
| very high levels potentially pushing the crack date to
| decades later than any ECC construction. With the
| potential that such a large quantum computer may never
| even arrive.
|
| There are several choices with scaling RSA too, you can
| push the primes which slows generation time considerably.
| Or the more reasonable approach is to settle on a prime
| size but use multiple of them (MP-RSA). The second
| approach scales indefinitely. Though it would only serve
| a purpose if you are determined to hedge against the
| accepted PQC algorithms (Kyber/MLKEM, McEliece) being
| broken at some point.
| bwesterb wrote:
| If you don't mind a one terabyte public key.
| https://eprint.iacr.org/2017/351.pdf
| adgjlsfhk1 wrote:
| also that paper (IMO) is ridiculously conservative. Just
| using 1GB keys is plenty sufficient since it would
| require a quantum computer with a billion bits to
| decrypt.
| trogdor wrote:
| Although I know it's an apocryphal quote, I am reminded
| of "640K should be enough for anybody."
|
| The Intel 4004, in 1971, had only 2,250 transistors.
|
| A handful of qubits today might become a billion sooner
| than you think.
| Vecr wrote:
| How long does it take to generate a key that big? What
| probabilities do you need to put on generating a
| composite number and not a prime? Does the prime need
| extra properties?
| coppsilgold wrote:
| Perfect forward secrecy requires the exchange of ephemeral
| keys. If you use either ECC or RSA for this and the traffic
| is captured a quantum computer will break it.
|
| All perfect forward secrecy means is that you delete your
| own ephemeral private keys, the public keys stay in the
| record. And a quantum computer will recover the deleted
| private keys.
|
| Also, none of the currently accepted post-quantum
| cryptographic algorithms offer a Diffie-Hellman
| construction. They use KEM (Key Encapsulation Mechanism).
| prmoustache wrote:
| > so there's a case to be made for switching to quantum-
| resistant cryptography (like lattice-based cryptography)
| sooner rather than later.
|
| This.
|
| People seems to think that because something is end to end
| encrypted it is secure. They don't seem to grasp that the
| traffic and communication that is possibly dumped/recorded
| now in encrypted form could be used against them decades
| later.
| pas wrote:
| Well. Yes, but currently there are no well tested (ie.
| recommended by the ITsec community) post-quantum
| cryptosystems as far as I understand.
|
| https://crypto.stackexchange.com/a/61596
|
| But ... AES is believed to be quantum-safe-ish, so with
| perfect forwards secrecy this exact threat can be quite
| well managed.
|
| The currently best known quantum attack on AES requires a
| serial computation of "half of key length" (Grover's
| algorithm ... so if they key is 128 bit long then it
| requires 2^64 sequential steps)
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/AskNetsec/comments/15i0nzp/aes256_
| i...
| _tk_ wrote:
| Google uses NTRU-HRSS internally, which seems reasonable.
|
| https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/identity-
| security/why...
| makeworld wrote:
| Signal and Apple both use post-quantum.
| pas wrote:
| I read about Signal's double-trouble tactics, but I
| haven't heard about Apple's.
|
| Ah, okay for iMessage, something called PQ3[1], hm, it
| uses Kyber. And it's also a hybrid scheme, combining ECC.
| And a lot of peer review.
|
| And there's also some formal verification for Signal's
| PQXDH [2].
|
| Oh, wow, not bad. Thanks!
|
| Now let's hope a good reliable sane implementation
| emerges so others can also try this scheme. (And I'm very
| curious of the added complexity/maintenance burden and
| computational costs. Though I guess this mostly runs on
| the end users' devices, right?)
|
| [1] https://security.apple.com/blog/imessage-pq3/ [2]
| https://github.com/Inria-Prosecco/pqxdh-analysis
| r33b33 wrote:
| > Worth spending a little time doing some long tail
| strategizing I'd say.
|
| What do you mean by this?
| unethical_ban wrote:
| The _only_ thing I know or understand about quantum computing
| is its ability to "crack" traditional encryption algorithms.
|
| So the commenter is saying that Cybersecurity needs to be
| planning for a near-world where traditional cryptography,
| including lots of existing data at rest, is suddenly as
| insecure as plaintext.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| "long tail" typically refers to the tail of a normal
| distribution - basically it's a sciencey, but common, way of
| saying "very unlikely event". So, the OP was saying that it's
| worth spending some time strategizing about the unlikely
| event that a practical RSA-breaking QC appears in the near
| future, even though it's still a "long tail" (very unlikely)
| event.
|
| Honestly, there's not that much to discuss on this though.
| The only things you can do from this strategizing is to
| consider even encrypted data as not safe to store, unless
| you're using quantum resistant encryption such as AES; and to
| budget time for switching to PQC as it becomes available.
| sizzle wrote:
| How long until this can derive a private key from its public
| key in the cryptocurrency space? Is this an existential threat
| to crypto?
| bawolff wrote:
| Long enough you don't need to panic or worry.
|
| Short enough that its reasonable to start r&d efforts on post
| quantum crypto.
| sizzle wrote:
| Is there a way to fork and add a quantum-proof encryption
| layer on the existing cryptocurrency paradigm i.e. Bitcoin
| 2.0?
| bawolff wrote:
| You could replace ECDSA with a post quantum algorithm.
| Keep in mind that many crypto primitives are safe, so
| there are large parts of bitcoin where you don't have to
| do anything. Digital signatures is going to be where the
| main problem is for bitcoin. But thinks like the hash
| algorithm should be fine (at most quantum gives a square
| root speed up for hashing, which isn't enough to be
| really concerning).
|
| One thing that might be problematic for a blockchain
| where everything has to go on the blockchain forever is
| that some post quantum schemes have really large
| signatures or key sizes.
|
| I'm not that familiar with the details of bitcoin, but i
| had the impression that p2pkh is more secure against
| quantum computers.
|
| [I should emphasize, im not a cryptographer and only
| somewhat familiar with bitcoin]
| beams_of_light wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BGP_hijacking#Public_incidents
|
| A long-term tactic of our adversaries is to capture network
| traffic for later decryption. The secrets in the mass of
| packets China assumedly has in storage, waiting for quantum
| tech, is a treasure trove that could lead to crucial state,
| corporate, and financial secrets being used against us or made
| public.
|
| AI being able to leverage quantum processing power is a threat
| we can't even fathom right now.
|
| Our world is going to change.
| inasio wrote:
| They showed a logical qubit that can last entangled for an
| hour, but to do that they had to combine their hundred or so
| physical qubits into a single one, so in some sense they have,
| right now, a single (logical) qubit
| weatherlite wrote:
| > AI and data security will be unalterably different if so
|
| So what are the implications if so ?
| vhiremath4 wrote:
| I really wish the release videos made things a ~tad~ bit less
| technical. I know quantum computers are still very early so the
| target audience is technical for this kind of release, but I
| can't help wonder how many more people would be excited and
| pulled in if they made the main release video more approachable.
| tcgv wrote:
| If you have programming experience, you might find this
| interesting: back in 2019, when Google announced achieving
| quantum supremacy, I worked on a personal project to study the
| basics of quantum computing and share my learnings with others
| in my blog:
|
| - https://thomasvilhena.com/2019/11/quantum-computing-for-
| prog...
| vhiremath4 wrote:
| Excellent thank you!
| rdtsc wrote:
| The main part for me is reducing error faster as they scale. This
| was a major road-block, known as "below threshold". That's a
| major achievement.
|
| I am not sure about RCS as the benchmark as not sure how useful
| that is in practice. It just produced really nice numbers. If I
| had a few billions of pocket change around, would I buy this to
| run RCS really fast? -Nah, probably not. I'll get more excited
| when they factor numbers at a rate that would break public key
| crypto. For that would spend my pocket change!
| vessenes wrote:
| The implication seems to be that they can implement other
| gates. As my gen z kids say: huge if true.
| wasabi991011 wrote:
| It's really important to note that the error correction test
| and the random circuit test are separate tests.
|
| The error correction is producing a single logical qubit of
| quantum memory, i.e. a single qubit with no gates applied to
| it.
|
| Meanwhile, the random circuit sampling uses physical qubits
| with no error correction, and is used as a good benchmark in
| part because it can prove "quantumness" even in the presence
| of noise.[1]
|
| [1] https://research.google/blog/validating-random-circuit-
| sampl...
| fidotron wrote:
| The slightly mind blowing bit is detailed here: >
| https://research.google/blog/making-quantum-error-correction...
|
| "the first quantum processor where error-corrected qubits get
| exponentially better as they get bigger"
|
| Achieving this turns the normal problem of scaling quantum
| computation upside down.
| thrance wrote:
| It also breaks a fundamental law of quantum theory, that the
| bigger a system in a quantum state is, the faster it collapses,
| exponentially so. Which should at least tell you to take
| Google's announcement with z grain of salt.
| wasabi991011 wrote:
| This is not a "fundamental law of quantum theory", as
| evidenced by the field of quantum error correcting codes.
|
| Google's announcement is legit, and is in line with what
| theory and simulations expect.
| bgnn wrote:
| Hmm why? I thought the whole idea was this would work
| eventually. Physical qubit vs logical qubit distinction is
| there already for a long time.
|
| The scaling problem is multifaceted. IMHO the physical qubits
| are the biggest barrier to scaling.
| fidotron wrote:
| > Hmm why?
|
| In theory, theory and practice are the same.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| We need to seriously think if our systems/society are even
| remotely ready for this.
| germandiago wrote:
| In order to evolve, forbiding evolution is the wrong path. Just
| use and study and learn from new things and accumulate
| experience is the way to go.
| kridsdale1 wrote:
| Biological evolution occurs on the backs of millions of
| deaths.
| hello_computer wrote:
| and a few extinctions!
| _benj wrote:
| This comment reminded me of the TV show I've been recently
| watching on Netflix, Pantheon. It's about a different technical
| breakthrough (I don't want to put any spoilers), but it's also
| something that completely alters society, no security is able
| to deal with that new technology, first thing that happens is
| that the technology is weaponized... etc.
|
| Idk enough about quantum computing to even understand this...
| but a technology that turns, say, AES or Blowfish, suddenly
| trivial to crack would very likely change the world
| kridsdale1 wrote:
| This is how I feel about drones.
| riiii wrote:
| They'll be banned for public use in the next 2-3 years. I'm
| not advocating for the ban, just saying it'll happen.
| debacle wrote:
| It's easier to make a "ghost drone" than a "ghost gun."
| Banning will not be feasible for bad actors.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| Banning anything is never about stopping theoretical "bad
| actors", it's about reducing the number of normal people
| who pick up "bad thing" and making mere ownership a
| suspicious enough act to compel investigation. It's about
| making things harder. A gun on a black market will be
| more expensive in a place that makes guns in general
| illegal. Small time Timmy will not be able to afford a
| gun to back up his desire to rob the local liquor store.
|
| Systemic design is usually about how you affect the
| margins
| seanw444 wrote:
| They're not. What's there to think about?
| preisschild wrote:
| As if "thinking about it" will ever stop people from acting
| first.
|
| I'm far more scared when tech-bros like Musk land on Mars and
| contaminate stuff we might not even be able to detect yet.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| i'm not even remotely 'far more scared' about that. i think
| you are insufficiently scared about crypto being broken
| drivebycomment wrote:
| Quantum computer becoming available / powerful does not
| mean all cryptography will get broken. People who have
| actual knowledge and expertise are already busy working on
| various aspects of PQC.
| taf2 wrote:
| Is this using ionq or is this in-house from google?
| vessenes wrote:
| They say in-house with their own US fab in the announcement.
| DebtDeflation wrote:
| >the more qubits we use in Willow, the more we reduce errors, and
| the more quantum the system becomes
|
| That's an EXTRAORDINARY claim and one that contradicts the
| experience of pretty much all other research and development in
| quantum error correction over the course of the history of
| quantum computing.
| wasabi991011 wrote:
| It's really not so extraordinary, exponential reduction in
| logical errors when the physical error rate is below a
| threshold (for certain types of error correcting codes_ is well
| accepted an both theoretical and computational grounds.
|
| For a rough but well-sourced overview, see Wikipedia:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threshold_theorem
|
| For a review paper on surface codes, see A. G. Fowler, M.
| Mariantoni, J. M. Martinis, and A. N. Cleland, "Surface codes:
| Towards practical large-scale quantum computation," Phys. Rev.
| A, vol. 86, no. 3, p. 032324, Sep. 2012, doi:
| 10.1103/PhysRevA.86.032324.
| DebtDeflation wrote:
| Does this not assume uncorrelated errors?
| wasabi991011 wrote:
| It does. It's up to engineering to make errors
| uncorrelated. The google paper being referenced actually
| makes an "error budget" to see what the main sources of
| errors are, and also run tests to find sources of
| correlated errors.
|
| The claim about this is that correlated errors will lead to
| an "error floor", a certain size of error correction past
| which exponential reduction in errors no longer applies,
| due to a certain frequency of correlated errors. See figure
| 3a of the arxiv version of the paper:
| https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.13687
| qnleigh wrote:
| I wouldn't call it extraordinary, as this has been expected
| since the first quantum error correcting codes were worked out
| theoretically. But it is a strong claim, backed up with
| comparably strong evidence. Figure 1d of the paper shows
| exactly this https://arxiv.org/html/2408.13687v1, and unlike
| many other comparable works, there are no hat tricks like post-
| selection to boost the numbers.
| deepburner wrote:
| it... doesn't? threshold theorems are well known.
| da-bacon wrote:
| >That's an EXTRAORDINARY claim and one that contradicts the
| experience of pretty much all other research and development in
| quantum error correction over the course of the history of
| quantum computing.
|
| Not sure why you would say that? This sort of exponential
| suppression of errors is exactly how quantum error correction
| works and why we think quantum computing is viable. Source:
| have worked on quantum error correction for a couple of
| decades. Disclosure: I work on the team that did this
| experiment. More reading: lecture notes from back in the day
| explaining this exponential suppression
| https://courses.cs.washington.edu/courses/cse599d/06wi/lectu...
| pjs_ wrote:
| It's a categorically new experimental regime but it's exactly
| what was supposed to happen. I think it's an awesome result.
| deanCommie wrote:
| I don't want to judge people by their cover, but I want to
| confess to having those feelings right now.
|
| In this day and age, I feel an immediate sense of distrust to any
| technologist with the "Burning Man" aesthetic for lack of a
| better word. (which you can see in the author's wikipedia profile
| from an adjacent festival ->
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hartmut_Neven, as well as in this
| blog itself with his wristbands and sunglasses ->
| https://youtu.be/l_KrC1mzd0g?si=HQdB3NSsLBPTSv-B&t=39)
|
| In the 2000's, any embracement of alternative culture was a
| breath of fresh air for technologists - it showed they cared
| about the human element of society as much as the mathematics.
|
| But nowadays, especially in a post-truthiness, post-COVID world,
| it comes off in a different way to me. Our world is now filled
| with quasi-scientific cults. From flat earthers to anti-vaxxers,
| to people focused on "healing crystals", to the resurgence of
| astrology.
|
| I wouldn't be saying this about anyone in a more shall we say
| "classical" domain. As a technologist, your claims are pretty
| easily verifiable and testable, even on fuzzy areas like large
| language models.
|
| But in the Quantum world? I immediately start to approach the
| author of this with distrust:
|
| * He's writing about multiverses
|
| * He's claiming a quantum performance for something that would
| take a classical computer septillions of years.
|
| I'm a layman in this domain. If these were true, should they be
| front page news on CNN and the BBC? Or is this just how
| technology breakthroughs start (after all the Transformer paper
| wasn't)
|
| But no matter what I just can't help but feel like the author's
| choices harm the credibility of the work. Before you downvote me,
| consider replying instead. I'm not defending feeling this way.
| I'm just explaining what I feel and why.
| bubblyworld wrote:
| I don't share your mistrust of the aesthetic, but I think it's
| pretty natural to be skeptical of the out-group, so to speak,
| doubly so if you have no practical way of verifying their
| claims. At least you're honest about it!
|
| I guess something to think about it that amongst a group like
| the "burners" there is huge variety in individual experience
| and skill. And even within a single human mind it's possible to
| have radically groundbreaking thoughts in one domain, and
| simultaneously be a total crack-pot in another. Linus Pauling
| and the vitamin C thing comes to mind. There's no such thing as
| an average person!
|
| I guess we'll see what the quantum experts have to say about
| this in the weeks to come =)
| leptons wrote:
| I know Hartmut Neven personally and professionally, and have
| for decades. He's not anything like you claim he is. Attacking
| him for wearing a wristband? That's an ad hominem attack, and
| not worthy of my time to counter you on.
|
| The fact is that "Burners" are everywhere, nothing about
| Burning Man means someone is automatically a quack. Your
| distrust seems misplaced and colored by your own personal
| biases. The list of prominent people in tech that are also
| "burners" would likely shock you. I doubt you've ever been to
| Burning Man, but you're going to judge people who have? Maybe
| you're just feeling a little bit too "square" and are
| threatened by people who live differently than you do.
|
| Yes, Hartmut has a style, yes, he enjoys his lifestyle, no,
| he's not a quack. You don't have to believe me, and I don't
| expect that you will, but I've talked at length with him about
| his work, and about a great many other topics, and he is not as
| you think he is.
|
| Your comment here says far more about you than it says about
| Hartmut Neven.
| deanCommie wrote:
| > Attacking him for wearing a wristband? That's an ad hominem
| attack, and not worthy of my time to counter you on.
|
| I picked my words very carefully and I would appreciate if
| you responded to what I said, not what you think I implied.
|
| I specifically called out - I'm having feelings of bias. That
| in a field full of quack science and overpromises and
| underdelivery, I am extraordinarily suspicious of anyone who
| I feel might be associated with a shall we say "less than
| rigorous relationship with scientific accuracy". This
| person's aesthetic reminds me of this.
|
| > The fact is that "Burners" are everywhere, nothing about
| Burning Man means someone is automatically a quack. Your
| distrust seems misplaced and colored by your own personal
| biases. The list of prominent people in tech that are also
| "burners" would likely shock you. I doubt you've ever been to
| Burning Man, but you're going to judge people who have? Maybe
| you're just feeling a little bit too "square" and are
| threatened by people who live differently than you do.
|
| You couldn't be more wrong. I'm a repeat Burner throughout
| the 2000's (though it's been a decade), and I've been to a
| dozen regional Burner events. I know many Burners both in the
| tech industry and outside of it.
|
| So I actually speak with some experience. I know wonderful
| people who are purely artists and are not
| scientifically/technologically inclined - and they're great.
| I also know deep technologists for whom Burning man is purely
| an aesthetic preference - a costume not an outfit. Something
| to pretend to be for a little while but that otherwise has no
| bearing on their outside life.
|
| And I unfortunately know those whose brainrot ends up
| intertwining. Crypto evangelists who find healing crystals
| just as groundbreaking as the blockchain. It's this latter
| category that I am the most suspicious of, and what I worry
| when I see a person presented as an authoritative leader in
| the Quantum Computing domain demonstrate in their external
| presentation.
|
| I led with an acknowledgement that I am judging a book by
| it's cover, which one ought to never do. But I think it is
| worth pointing out because respectability in a cutting edge
| field is important, lest you end up achieving technological
| breakthroughs that don't actually change society at all (as
| already happened with Google Glass).
|
| > You don't have to believe me, and I don't expect that you
| will,
|
| Why would you expect that I wouldn't?
|
| > but I've talked at length with him about his work, and
| about a great many other topics, and he is not as you think
| he is.
|
| That's fantastic to hear! You have direct evidence
| contradicting the assumptions generated by my first
| impression. This is all that matters, and all you had to say.
| leptons wrote:
| >who I feel
|
| You're basing things on your feelings, not personally
| knowing the person. I know you've alluded to that, but
| seriously, just stop.
|
| > I worry when I see a person presented as an authoritative
| leader in the Quantum Computing domain demonstrate in their
| external presentation.
|
| I'm not sure why how someone dresses makes you worry,
| especially since you aren't even involved in QC. Stop
| worrying about things you can't control, especially someone
| else's appearance. _Has Burning Man taught you nothing_? If
| you think it taught you to be biased towards someone based
| on their appearance, then I think you completely missed the
| point.
|
| >as already happened with Google Glass
|
| You may not know this, but he was tapped to lead the Google
| Glass project, and quickly got out of it. He felt that the
| silicon at the time was not capable of producing the
| results people wanted in the form-factor they were
| expecting. He was right. Of course tech has improved since
| then and better VR/AR glasses in a convenient form factor
| are just now starting to be a thing, but Google Glass is
| long since shuttered.
|
| He didn't just come out of nowhere, he's been involved in
| actual AI (not LLMs) for decades. His company was bought by
| Google and is the basis for their computer vision systems,
| which is how he ended up at Google.
|
| As for you supposing he's into "healing crystals" or any
| other wooo nonsense simply based on how he dresses, I have
| never known him to talk about such things at all, in all
| our conversations throughout the decades.
|
| > This person's aesthetic reminds me of this.
|
| You are barking up the wrong tree, and you should maybe
| tone down your judginess of others. I have news for you -
| _you can 't tell a book by its cover_, but you sure are
| trying to. You just come off as being jealous that someone
| can have fun and also be a pioneer in QC. No doubt any
| person at the top of their field has plenty of haters,
| based on nothing more than "he doesn't dress like I expect
| him to".
| wasabi991011 wrote:
| > I know Hartmut Neven personally and professionally, and
| have for decades
|
| I don't want to put you on the spot too much, but can you
| speak to why he included the part about many-worlds in this
| blog post?
|
| I don't know enough about Google to say if maybe someone else
| less technical wrote that, or if he is being pressured to put
| sci-fi sounding terms in his posts, or if he believes
| Google's quantum computer is actually testing many-worlds, or
| some other reason I can't think of.
| wasabi991011 wrote:
| > I immediately start to approach the author of this with
| distrust:
|
| > * He's writing about multiverses
|
| > * He's claiming a quantum performance for something that
| would take a classical computer septillions of years.
|
| > I'm a layman in this domain
|
| I think your skepticism is well-founded. But as you learn more
| about the field, you learn what parts are marketing/hype
| bullshit, and what parts are not, and how to translate from the
| bullshit to the underlying facts.
|
| IMO:
|
| > He's writing about multiverses
|
| The author's pet theory, no relevance to the actual science
| being done.
|
| * He's claiming a quantum performance for something that would
| take a classical computer septillions of years.
|
| The classical computer is running a very naive algorithm,
| basically brute-force. It is very easy to write a classical
| algorithm which is very slow. But still, in the field, it takes
| new state-of-the-art classical algorithms run on medium size
| clusters to get results that are on-par with recent quantum
| computers. Not even much better, just on-par.
|
| > Or is this just how technology breakthroughs start (after all
| the Transformer paper wasn't)
|
| You could say that. It's not truly a breakthrough, but it is
| one more medium-size step in a rapidly advancing field.
| hello_computer wrote:
| The hall of great scientists is packed with holders of strange
| beliefs. Half of Newton's writings were on religious
| speculation, alchemy, and the occult. One of Einstein's very
| favorite books was Blavatsky's " _Isis Unveiled_ ". Just about
| every key person in early QM was deep into the Vedas. Kary
| Mullis was an AIDS denialist, and questioned the utility of his
| own test as a virus detector. If you really think about it, you
| will see that this phenomenon arises more from necessity than
| coincidence.
| Aeium wrote:
| The quantum performance thing is real, but that the random
| circuit sampling problem they are tabling as the benchmark here
| is for a quantum circuit.
|
| So really what is being claimed is that classical computers
| can't easily simulate quantum ones. But is that really
| surprising?
|
| What would be surprising would be that kind of speedup vs
| classical on some kind of general optimization algorithm. I
| don't think that is what they are claiming though, even if it
| does kind of seem like it's being presented that way.
| pandemic_region wrote:
| > Willow performed a standard benchmark computation in under five
| minutes that would take one of today's fastest supercomputers 10
| septillion years -- a number that vastly exceeds the age of the
| Universe.
|
| What computation would that be?
|
| Also, what is the relationship, if any, between quantum computing
| and AI? Are these technologies complementary?
| ra7 wrote:
| It's in the article. Random circuit sampling benchmark:
| https://research.google/blog/validating-random-circuit-sampl...
| crote wrote:
| Is it really fair to call that "computation"? I am
| _definitely_ not an expert, but it seems they are just doing
| a meaningless operation which happens to be trivial on a
| quantum computer but near-impossible to simulate on a
| classical computer.
|
| To me that sounds a bit like saying my "sand computer"
| (hourglass) is way faster than a classical computer, because
| it'd take a classical computer trillions of years to
| _exactly_ simulate the final position of every individual
| grain of sand.
|
| Sure, it proves that your quantum computer is actually a
| _genuine_ quantum computer, but it 's not going to be topping
| the LINPACK charts or factoring large semiprimes any time
| soon, is it?
| becquerel wrote:
| As they say explicitly in the article, this is like
| criticizing the first rocket to reach the edge of space for
| not getting anywhere useful.
| crote wrote:
| It seems like they went from lighting a candle to firing
| off some fireworks. Impressive, but there's still a long
| way to go until they can land a human on the moon - let
| alone travel to Alpha Centauri like some people are
| claiming.
| andrewla wrote:
| Yes, this is exactly what it is doing [1]. The area of
| research is Noisy Intermediate Scale Quantum, and has
| arisen specifically to prove that quantum supremacy is
| possible in practice. It is currently the focus of pretty
| much all quantum computing research because attempts to
| produce a generalized quantum computer have all failed
| miserably. Existing practical quantum computers (like
| DWave) perform various annealing tasks but have basically
| proven to be inferior to probablistic algorithms computing
| the same task.
|
| To date all attempt to produce valid claims of quantum
| supremacy via this channel have failed on closer
| inspection, and there is no reason to assume otherwise in
| this case until researchers have had time to look at the
| paper. There's a number of skeptics in the quantum
| computing field that believe that this is simply not
| possible.
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42369463
| hermitcrab wrote:
| Are DWave still in the running? They used my
| PerfectTablePlan table seating software back in 2007 as
| the front end to demonstrate solving a combinatorial
| seating problem: https://www.perfecttableplan.com/newslet
| ters/newsletter10_we...
| drkevorkian wrote:
| It's different from your hourglass in that the computer is
| controllable. Each sampled random circuit requires choosing
| all of the operations that the computer will perform. You
| have no control over what operation the hourglass does.
|
| It won't be factoring large numbers yet because that
| computation requires the ability to perform millions of
| operations on thousands of qubits without any errors. You
| need very good error correction to do that, but luckily
| that's the other thing they demonstrated. Only when they do
| error correction, they are basically combining their system
| down into one effective qubit. They'll need to scale by
| several orders of magnitude to have hundreds of error
| corrected qubits to do factoring.
| 0xB31B1B wrote:
| "Also, what is the relationship, if any, between quantum
| computing and AI? Are these technologies complementary?"
|
| AI is limited in part by the computation available at training
| and runtime. If your computer is 10^X times faster, then your
| model is also "better". Thats why we have giant warehouses full
| of H100 chips pulling down a few megawatts from the grid right
| now. Quantum computing could theoretically allow your phone to
| do that.
| spencerflem wrote:
| A quantum computer is not just a 10^X faster normal computer.
|
| Are there AI algorithms that would benefit from quantum?
| kridsdale1 wrote:
| Makes sense. My brain is able to do that work on milliwatts.
| pdabbadabba wrote:
| Actually about 20 W -- if you ignore the 80 W used by the
| rest of the body (which seems debatable). And clearly far
| more than this was required to 'train' the human brain to
| the level of intelligence we have today.[1] But this still
| probably doesn't take away from your point. The human brain
| seems to be many orders of magnitude more efficient than
| our most advanced AI technology.
|
| Though the more I think about this, the more I wonder how
| they really would compare if you made a strictly apples-to-
| apples comparison.
|
| [1]
| https://psychology.stackexchange.com/questions/12385/how-
| muc...
| wasabi991011 wrote:
| > Also, what is the relationship, if any, between quantum
| computing and AI? Are these technologies complementary?
|
| Ongoing research.
|
| The main idea of quantum machine learning is that qubits make
| an exponentially high-dimensional space with linear resources,
| so can store and compute a lot of data easily.
|
| However, getting the data in and results out of the quantum
| computer is tricky, and if you need many iterations in your
| optimization, that may destroy any advantage you have from
| using quantum computers.
| oldgradstudent wrote:
| > Also, what is the relationship, if any, between quantum
| computing and AI? Are these technologies complementary?
|
| AI is quite good in producing the meaningless drivel needed for
| quantum computing related press releases.
| sys32768 wrote:
| In other words, get off the cloud so nobody has your encrypted
| data which they will be able to crack in a few minutes five or
| ten years from now?
| noident wrote:
| It depends on the algorithm you use to encrypt your data.
|
| Only asymmetric cryptography is threatened. There is no
| realistic threat to symmetric encryption like AES.
|
| If you are encrypting your cloud data with ed25519 or RSA, then
| yes, a quantum computer could theoretically someday crack them.
| Havoc wrote:
| > Only asymmetric cryptography is threatened.
|
| aka everything we use daily
| codeulike wrote:
| They opened the API for it and I'm sending requests but the
| response always comes back 300ms before I send the request, is
| there a way of handling that with try{} predestined{} blocks? Or
| do I need to use the Bootstrap Paradox library?
| timcobb wrote:
| What does Gemini say?
| KTibow wrote:
| It responds with 4500 characters:
| https://hst.sh/olahososos.md
| wk_end wrote:
| Finally, INTERCAL's COME FROM statement has a practical use.
| handfuloflight wrote:
| Have you tried using the Schrodinger Exception Handler? It
| catches errors both before and after they occur simultaneously,
| until you observe the stack trace.
| oblio wrote:
| I swear I can't tell which of these comments are
| sarcastic/parody and which are actual answers.
|
| A sort of quantum commenting conundrum, I guess.
| camillomiller wrote:
| They are both, just until the moment you try to read them
| weakwire wrote:
| I read them as sarcastic. Please reply here with your
| output.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| Since you read them as sarcastic, I also read them as
| sarcastic. Quantum entanglement at work.
| 3l3ktr4 wrote:
| This subthread are among the best comments I've read in
| this website.
| nobrains wrote:
| What happens when you don't send the request after receiving
| the response? Please try and report back.
| r3trohack3r wrote:
| You unlock the "You've met a terrible fate." achievement [1]
|
| [1] https://outerwilds.fandom.com/wiki/Achievements
| atoav wrote:
| I love myself a good Zelda reference
| ukuina wrote:
| Please report back and try.*
| tealpod wrote:
| Looks like we don't have a choice.
| jmcqk6 wrote:
| No matter what we've tried so far, the request ends up being
| sent.
|
| The first time I was just watching, determined not to press
| the button, but when I received the response, I was startled
| into pressing it.
|
| The second time, I just stepped back from my keyboard, and my
| cat came flying out of the back room and walked on the
| keyboard, triggering the request.
|
| The third time, I was holding my cat, and a train rumbled by
| outside, rattling my desk and apparently triggering the
| switch to send the request.
|
| The fourth time, I checked the tracks, was holding my cat,
| and stepped back from my keyboard. Next thing I heard was a
| POP from my ceiling, and the request was triggered. There was
| a small hole burned through my keyboard when I examined it.
| Best I can figure, what was left of a meteorite managed to
| hit at exactly the right time.
|
| I'm not going to try for a fifth time.
| cloudking wrote:
| The answer is yes and no, simultaneously
| yu3zhou4 wrote:
| Did you try staring on your IP packets while sending the
| requests?
| Nifty3929 wrote:
| Try using inverse promises. You get back the result you wanted,
| but if you don't then send the request the response is useless.
|
| It's a bit like Jeopardy, really.
| dtquad wrote:
| >They opened the API for it and I'm sending requests but the
| response always comes back 300ms before I send the request
|
| For a brief moment I thought this was some quantum-magical side
| effect you were describing and not some API error.
| pinkmuffinere wrote:
| Isn't that.... the joke?
| vangamoZX wrote:
| Write the catch clause before the try block
| sebastiennight wrote:
| You are getting that response 300ms beforehand because your
| request is denied.
|
| If you auth with the bearer token "And There Are No Friends At
| Dusk." then the API will call you and tell you which request
| you wanted to send.
| GuB-42 wrote:
| It think you are supposed to use a "past" object to get your
| results before calling the API.
| tiborsaas wrote:
| Try setting up a beam-splitter router and report back with the
| interference pattern. If you don't see a wave pattern it might
| be because someone is spying on you.
| yonatan8070 wrote:
| Pretty sure you just need to use await-async (as opposed to
| async-await)
| codeulike wrote:
| Update: I tried installing the current Boostrap Paradox library
| but it says I have to uninstall next years version first.
| nick3443 wrote:
| Help! Every time I receive the response, an equal number of
| bits elsewhere in memory are reported as corrupt by my ECC RAM.
| robomartin wrote:
| > I'm sending requests but the response always comes back 300ms
| before I send the request
|
| Ah. Newbie mistake. You need to turn OFF your computer and
| disconnect from the network BEFORE sending the request. Without
| this step you will always receive a response before the request
| is issued.
| qingcharles wrote:
| I'm trying to write a new version of Snake game in Microsoft Q#
| but it keeps eating its own tail.
| kernal wrote:
| >Willow's performance on this benchmark is astonishing: It
| performed a computation in under five minutes that would take one
| of today's fastest supercomputers 1025 or 10 septillion years. If
| you want to write it out, it's 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000
| years. This mind-boggling number exceeds known timescales in
| physics and vastly exceeds the age of the universe. It lends
| credence to the notion that quantum computation occurs in many
| parallel universes, in line with the idea that we live in a
| multiverse, a prediction first made by David Deutsch.
|
| A much simpler explanation is that your benchmark is severely
| flawed.
| wasabi991011 wrote:
| "Severely flawed" is a matter of interpretation, and I don't
| want to argue for or against.
|
| But to put into context, these numbers are likely accurate, but
| represent the time it would take for a very naive classical
| algorithm (possibly brute-force, I am unsure).
|
| For example, the previous result claimed it would take Summit
| 10,000 years to do the same calculation as the Sycamore quantum
| chip. However, other researchers were able to reproduce results
| classically using tensor-network-based methods in 14.5 days
| using a "relatively small cluster". [1]
|
| [1] G. Kalachev, P. Panteleev, P. Zhou, and M.-H. Yung,
| "Classical sampling of random quantum circuits with bounded
| fidelity," arXiv.org, https://arxiv.org/abs/2112.15083
| (accessed Dec. 9, 2024).
| xnx wrote:
| Is anyone else even close to Google in this space? (e.g. on the
| "System Metrics" the blog defines)
| wasabi991011 wrote:
| I would expect IBM, but I can't find any information on their
| system metrics based on a quick google search.
|
| Would love if someone could weight in.
| lanthissa wrote:
| not publicly
| taf2 wrote:
| IonQ - they are powering AWS solution here:
| https://aws.amazon.com/braket/quantum-computers/ionq/
|
| Not sure if they are close in terms of specs but looks like
| they are a viable solution and seeing an increase in
| utilization over the last year... Seems both are pretty
| interesting to keep an eye on.
| EvgeniyZh wrote:
| Main players IMHO are IBM and Quantinuum, the latter employing
| different platform (ions). Neither could perform the same
| experiment I think, but have their own advantages. QuEra also
| looks good but are not as mature yet imho.
| paxys wrote:
| Give it a few more years and a smaller, more focused company
| will come in and launch a successful product based on their
| research.
| cahaya wrote:
| I'm wondering how this Google announcement will have an impact
| on their future revenue, and how easily competitors can
| replicate this breakthrough?
| krick wrote:
| I would be very grateful if somebody can point to an actually
| good blogpost/video that would summarize the current state of
| the domain. I mean, I remember some "quantum annealing"
| providers as far as some 10 years ago (I mean, as a service, as
| such D-Wave exists for 25 years now), but I never actually
| learned if they are truly useful for anything (like, real
| numbers, what amount of computation these thing can perform and
| if it's truly cheaper/faster than throwing a bunch of GPUs on
| it). From time to time there are some news feturing dope
| photos, about some new chip from IBM, that is useful for
| nothing, but a big breakthrough for reasons I don't understand.
|
| But I don't really have a feel of what's going on, really. How
| many quantum computers there are, is there anything that is
| actually capable of performing anything more than just being an
| ongoing research prototype? Some educated guesses about how far
| can be some non-public projects by now? Like, is it possible
| that some secret CIA project is further ahead than what we
| know, or if it's even more unlikely and farther away than
| fusion power? Or maybe it's even more comparable to cold
| fusion?
|
| I know, that this kinda exists as an idea, and apparently
| somebody's working on it, but that's pretty much it.
| fguerraz wrote:
| Am I oversimplifying in thinking that they've demonstrated that
| their quantum computer is better than at simulating a quantum
| system than a classical computer?
|
| In which case, should I be impressed? I mean sure, it sounds like
| you've implemented a quantum VM.
| TachyonicBytes wrote:
| Simulating a quantum system is a hard challenge and it's
| actually how Feynman proposed the quantum computing paradigm in
| the first place. It's basically the original motive.
| freetonik wrote:
| Exactly.
|
| I've seen lots of people dismissing this as if it isn't
| impressive or important. I've watched one video where the
| author said in a deprecating manner "quantum computers are
| good for just two things: generating random numbers and
| simulating quantum systems".
|
| It's like saying "the thing is good for just two things:
| making funny noises and producing infinite energy".
|
| (Also, generating random numbers is pretty useful, but I
| digress)
| slater wrote:
| I bet Vimeo videos will still chug on it
| TachyonicBytes wrote:
| Link to the actual article:
| https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-08449-y
| qnleigh wrote:
| and the arXiv preprint, which isn't paywalled
| https://arxiv.org/html/2408.13687v1
| wasabi991011 wrote:
| And contains more information, figures, and lots of
| supplementary material.
| zelon88 wrote:
| > It lends credence to the notion that quantum computation occurs
| in many parallel universes, in line with the idea that we live in
| a multiverse, a prediction first made by David Deutsch.
|
| Can someone explain to me how he made the jump from "we achieved
| a meaninful threshold in quantum computing performance" to "The
| multiverse is probably real."
| dekhn wrote:
| The explanation is that Hartmut Neven has a bunch of sci-fi
| beliefs and somehow has managed to hold onto his job and even
| get to write parts of press releases.
| not_a_bot_4sho wrote:
| My money is on edibles.
| radioactivist wrote:
| Some of these results have been on the arxiv for a few months
| (https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.13687) -- are there any details on
| new stuff besides this blog post? I can't find anything on the
| random circuit sampling in the preprint (or its early access
| published version).
| qnleigh wrote:
| The peer-reviewed version at Nature has more technical details
| about the processor itself.
| ryandvm wrote:
| Imagine your civilization develops quantum computing technology
| and it's for... advertising.
|
| "What is their mission? Cure cancer? Eliminate poverty? Explore
| the universe? No, their goal: to sell another fucking Nissan."
| --Scott Galloway
| mperham wrote:
| That's how you monetize attention, digital consumption. If you
| aren't paying for it, you are the product being sold.
| NoOn3 wrote:
| In modern world, sometimes, even if you pay for it, it
| doesn't always give guarantees... :(
| softwaredoug wrote:
| With this plus the weather model announcement. I'm curious what
| people think about the meta question on why corporate labs like
| Google DeepMind etc seem to make more progress on big problems
| than academia?
|
| There are a lot of critiques about academia. In particular that
| it's so grant obsessed you have to stay focused on your next
| grant all the time. This environment doesnt seem to reward
| solving big problems but paper production to prove the last grant
| did something. Yet ostensibly we fund fundamental public research
| precisely for fundamental changes. The reality seems to be the
| traditional funding model create incremental progress within
| existing paradigms.
| LeftHandPath wrote:
| I did quantum computing research in university. We did
| meaningful work and published meaningful research.
|
| Around 50% of our time was spent working in Overleaf making
| small improvements to old projects so that we could submit to
| some new journal or call-for-papers. We were always doing peer
| review or getting peer reviewed. We were working with a lot of
| 3rd-party tools (e.g. FPGAs, IBM Q, etc). And our team was
| constantly churning due to people getting their degrees and
| leaving, people getting too busy with coursework, and people
| deciding they just weren't interested anymore.
|
| Compare that to the corporate labs: They have a fully
| proprietary ecosystem. The people who developed that ecosystem
| are often the ones doing research on/with it. They aren't
| taking time off of their ideas to handle peer-review processes.
| They aren't taking time off to handle unrelated coursework.
| Their researchers don't graduate and start looking for
| professor positions at other universities.
|
| It's not surprising in the slightest that the corporate labs do
| better. They're more focused and better suited for long-term
| research.
| softwaredoug wrote:
| I wonder what makes research different than product
| development at a company?
|
| Because in product development, there can be short-sighted
| industry decisions based on quarterly returns. I've also seen
| a constant need to justify outcomes based on KPIs etc, and
| constantly justifying your work, etc.
| LeftHandPath wrote:
| Research _is_ product development. Successful companies
| treat it with respect.
|
| > Because in product development, there can be short-
| sighted industry decisions based on quarterly returns. I've
| also seen a constant need to justify outcomes based on KPIs
| etc, and constantly justifying your work, etc.
|
| I have seen this as well. It's extremely common (especially
| among publicly-owned companies) and frustrating. But it's
| not ubiquitous. Consider LM's Skunkworks or Apple's quiet
| development of the iPhone, and compare it to companies that
| finish a product and then focus on cutting costs / nickel-
| and-diming their customers.
| anonymousDan wrote:
| Where exactly do you think the idea for a quantum computer came
| from in the first place?
| lysecret wrote:
| I can only speak for the weather models (since it is in my
| domain). The answer is that the issues are much more
| engineering and scaling/infra issues than theoretical issues,
| and google is good at engineering (or attracts people that
| are).
| andrewla wrote:
| This is yet another attempt to posit NISQ results (Noisy
| Intermediate Scale Quantum) as demonstrations of quantum
| supremacy. This does not allow us to do useful computational
| work; it's just making the claim that a bathtub full of water can
| do fluid dynamic simulations faster than a computer with a
| bathtub-full-of-water-number-of-cores can do the same
| computation.
|
| If history is any guide we'll soon see that there are problems
| with the fidelity (the system they use to verify that the results
| are "correct") or problems with the difficulty of the underlying
| problem, as happened with Google's previous attempt to
| demonstrate quantum supremacy [1].
|
| [1] https://gilkalai.wordpress.com/2024/12/09/the-case-
| against-g... -- note that although coincidentally published the
| same day as this announcement, this is talking about Google's
| previous results, not Willow.
| cryptozeus wrote:
| QTUM
| cloudking wrote:
| Contains MSTR and not GOOG...
| cryptozeus wrote:
| Point is to get in before goog gets in
| djoldman wrote:
| I wonder if anyone else will be forced to wait on
| https://scottaaronson.blog/ to tell us if this is significant.
| gloriousduke wrote:
| I was about to add a similar comment. Definitely interested to
| read his evaluation and whether there is more hype than
| substance here, though I'm guessing it may take some time.
| EvgeniyZh wrote:
| He told when the preprint was published
|
| https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=8310
| qnleigh wrote:
| He's already blogged about it a bit here
|
| https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=8310#comments
|
| and here
|
| https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=8329
|
| though I bet he will have more to say now that the paper is
| officially out.
| bn-l wrote:
| This is weird. I got this pop up halfway through reading:
|
| > After reading this article, how has your perception of Google
| changed? Gotten better Gotten worse Stayed the same
| beyondCritics wrote:
| >It lends credence to the notion that quantum computation occurs
| in many parallel universes, in line with the idea that we live in
| a multiverse, a prediction first made by David Deutsch.
|
| Makes sense, or doesn't it? What's your take on the multiverse
| theory?
| dom96 wrote:
| Can anyone comment on how this chip is built? What does the
| hardware look like?
| stan_kirdey wrote:
| Is anyone fine-tuning llama to write Q#? I feel LLMs can be a
| helpful tool in learning how to code quantum systems.
| dtquad wrote:
| Do Americans still want to breakup the big US tech companies like
| Google? With proper regulation it feels like their positive
| externalities, like this, is good for humanity.
| 0_____0 wrote:
| "Proper regulation" may involve breaking companies into pieces
| such that they cannot dominate industries and deprive the
| public the option of choosing a different provider for the
| services they provide. Does an Alphabet subsidiary working on
| quantum computer research require 90% of search traffic to go
| through Google? Or for Android handsets to send a really
| phenomenal amount of telemetry back to the mothership with no
| real recourse for the average user?
| skort wrote:
| The key words here are "proper regulation". In an era where
| industries have captured governmental bodies, there will likely
| be no such regulation, and these tech companies will continue
| to siphon up resources and funnel them to a handful at the top.
|
| A quote from the article is especially ludicrous: > to benefit
| society by advancing scientific discovery, developing helpful
| applications, and tackling some of society's greatest
| challenges
|
| You don't need a quantum computer to do this. We can solve
| housing and food scarcity today, arguably our greatest
| challenges. Big tech has been claiming that it's going to solve
| all of our problems for decades now and it has yet to put up.
|
| If you want this type of technology to be made and do actual
| good, we need publicly funded research institutions. Tech won't
| save us.
| noisy_boy wrote:
| Regulation is the handle of the chainsaw aka corporation.
| Right now it is a bit wobbly which explains the cuts on the
| society we see around us. The faster we make the blades turn
| due to technological advances, the firmer the handle needs to
| be.
| correlator wrote:
| I met julian touring UCSB as perspective grad students. We sat
| together at dinner and he was really smart, kind, and outgoing.
| Great to see him presenting this work!
| robot wrote:
| there is so much skepticism on quantum computing that instead of
| inflated marketing words one should always start by what the
| biggest problems are, how they are not still solved yet, and then
| introduce what the new improvement is.
|
| Otherwise there is no knowing if the accomplishment is really
| significant or not.
| gauge_field wrote:
| Especially if you consider how they choose the words and how
| they can be interpreted
|
| " Second, Willow performed a standard benchmark computation in
| under five minutes that would take one of today's "
|
| Standard benchmark in what sense. Well, it was chosen for task
| where quantum computer would have better performance.
|
| I am not saying this is nothing. Maybe, use more reserved
| words, e.g. "special quantum oriented benchmark" or something.
|
| When I think of standard benchmark, I am thinking more common
| scenarios, e.g. searching, sorting, matrix multiplication.
| Sakurai_Quantum wrote:
| Great time to learn the mathematical foundations of quantum
| computing rigorously:
| https://quantumformalism.academy/mathematical-foundations-fo....
| All self-paced with problem sheets (proof challenges) and worked
| out solutions, etc.
| Sakurai_Quantum wrote:
| Here is a free preview (lecture 6): https://youtu.be/6rf-
| hjyNl4U
| staunton wrote:
| This is a great technical achievement. It gives me some hope to
| see that the various companies are able to invest into what is
| still very basic science, even if it were mostly as vanity
| projects for advertising purposes.
|
| Quantum computing will surely have amazing applications that we
| cannot even conceive of right now. The earliest and maybe most
| useful applications might be in material science and medicine.
|
| I'm somewhat disappointed that most discussions here focus on
| cryptography or even cryptocurrencies. People will just switch to
| post-quantum algorithms and most likely still have decades left
| to do so. Almost all data we have isn't important enough that
| intercept-now-decrypt-later really matters, and if you think you
| have such data, switch now...
|
| Breaking cryptography is the most boring and useless application
| (among actual applications) of quantum computing. It's purely
| adversarial, merely an inconsequential step in a pointless arms
| race that we'd love to stop, if only we could learn to trust each
| other. To focus on this really betrays a lack of imagination.
| rgmerk wrote:
| "Quantum computing will surely have amazing applications that
| we cannot even conceive of right now..."
|
| As best I understand, it's not clear yet whether quantum
| computing will _ever_ have any practical applications.
|
| Furthermore, there has already been a great deal of work
| identifying potential applications for a quantum computer, so
| I'd say we've got a fair idea of what you could do with one if
| it ever exists.
| gauge_field wrote:
| The first (and important enough) practical application (apart
| from breaking RSA) seems to be simulation of quantum systems.
| But, this has some problems since alot of quantum models can
| be simulated with Deep Learning methods (getting better) to a
| good approximation. Probably, some quantum systems wont be
| good for (classical) Deep Learning, those might be the first
| candidates for application of quantum computers.
| hi41 wrote:
| What benchmark is being referred here?
|
| >>Willow performed a standard benchmark computation in under five
| minutes that would take one of today's fastest supercomputers 10
| septillion (that is, 1025) years -- a number that vastly exceeds
| the age of the Universe
| dbrans wrote:
| https://research.google/blog/validating-random-circuit-sampl...
| hi41 wrote:
| If error is getting corrected, doesn't it mean lower entropy? If
| so where else is entropy increasing, if it is a valid question to
| be asked.
| roywiggins wrote:
| Probably the same as normal chips: waste heat?
| codeyperson wrote:
| If we are in a simulation. This seems like a good path to getting
| our process terminated for consuming too much compute.
| prettyStandard wrote:
| AI too.
|
| I've followed Many worlds & Simulation theory a bit too far and
| I ended up back where I started.
|
| I feel like the most likely scenario is we are in a AI
| (kinder)garden being grown for future purposes.
|
| So God is real, heaven is real, and your intentions matter.
|
| Obviously I have no proof...
| swores wrote:
| > " _and your intentions matter._ "
|
| How do you reach that conclusion?
|
| Characters in The Sims games technically have us human
| players as gods, it doesn't mean that when we uninstall the
| game those characters get to come into our earthly (to them)
| heaven or have any consequences for actions performed during
| the simulation?
| prettyStandard wrote:
| Sure it would. If you had Sims that went around killing
| other Sims, there's no way in hell you would promote them,
| or use their stimulated experiences as a bases for more
| complex/serious projects.
|
| I'm not deep into LLMs or AI safety right now, but if you
| have a bad performing AI, you aren't going to use it as a
| base for future work.
|
| I was about to go to bed so I was rushing through my
| initial comment... I was just trying to understand the
| motivations for trying to create a stimulated reality...
| Look at the resources we spend on AI?
| djhn wrote:
| One would have to be rather optimistic and patient if one
| was to hold out hope for the humanity experiment to not
| be destined for the Trash bin in this scenario, with our
| track record.
| a2128 wrote:
| I doubt we would even register as a blip. The universe is
| absolutely massive and there's celestial events that are
| unthinkably massive and complex. Black hole mergers,
| supernovae, galaxies merging. Hell, think of what chaos happens
| in the inside of our own sun, and multiply that by 100 billion
| stars in a galaxy, and multiply that by 100 billion galaxies.
| Humanity is ultimately inconsequential.
| swores wrote:
| Surely it would depend on what the simulation actually was?
|
| If you imagine simulations we can build ourselves, such as
| video games, it's not hard to add something at the edge of
| the map that users are prevented from reaching and have the
| code send "this thing is massive and powerful" data to the
| players. Who's to say that the simulation isn't actually
| focussed on earth, and everything including the sun is
| actually just a fiction designed to fool us?
| prettyStandard wrote:
| For me the interesting thing is, assuming miny worlds AND
| simulation theory are both true. Many worlds would seem to
| be a way to essentially run a/b tests on the simulation. So
| how would you separate out/simplify details of your
| simulation like far away planet stars and galaxies? The
| speed of light and light cones, don't seem to be enough to
| make a difference except for on the largest scales.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| The common trait that all hypothetical high-fidelity
| simulated universes possess is the ability to produce high-
| fidelity simulated universes. And since our current world
| does not possess this ability, it would mean that either
| humans are in the real universe, and therefore simulated
| universes have not yet been created, or that humans are the
| last in a very long chain of simulated universes, an
| observation that makes the simulation hypothesis seem less
| probable.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| >The common trait that all hypothetical high-fidelity
| simulated universes possess is the ability to produce
| high-fidelity simulated universes.
|
| Where have you seen this?
| vlovich123 wrote:
| https://youtu.be/pmcrG7ZZKUc?t=220
|
| If we're a simulation of a parent universe that is
| exactly like us just of it's past or an alternate past,
| then we likely should be able to achieve simulating our
| own universe within ourselves. Otherwise we're not
| actually a simulation.
|
| There's another line of counter argument that various
| results in QM and computing theory would suggest that
| it's mathematically impossible for the universe to be
| simulated on a computer (i.e. the parent universe would
| have to look very different from ours vs ours in the
| future). But I don't recall the arxiv paper.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| >If we're a simulation of a parent universe that is
| exactly like us just of it's past or an alternate past
|
| Yes, this is a MASSIVE and COMPLETELY UNTESTABLE if
|
| Everything about simulation theory is like, science-
| hostile or something it seems.
| rkagerer wrote:
| How much support infrastructure does this thing need? (eg.
| Cryogenic cooling?) How big is a whole 'computer' and how much
| power draw?
| Havoc wrote:
| So is it time to 100x key length on browsers yet or not?
| bwesterb wrote:
| About 8x just for key agreement and 40x for signatures. It's a
| lot. For key agreement it's worth it, and now about 1/3 of
| browsers in the wild use it.
| http://radar.cloudflare.com/adoption-and-u...
| jxdxbx wrote:
| More misleading random circuit sampling benchmarks. All it proves
| is that Google has built a quantum computer that does quantum
| things.
| webdevver wrote:
| what is this actually useful for?
| mvkel wrote:
| Seems to coincide with Google's annual quantum announcement,
| which has happened each fall since 2014
| riku_iki wrote:
| annual perf cycle probably
| rvz wrote:
| I don't usually say this often, unlike most here but this is
| actually a huge achievement in quantum computing.
|
| Yet another example as to why Google is essentially not going
| anywhere or 'dying' as most have been proclaiming these days.
| Uptrenda wrote:
| 'It lends credence to the notion that quantum computation occurs
| in many parallel universes, in line with the idea that we live in
| a multiverse, a prediction first made by David Deutsch.'
|
| Wait... what? Google said this and not some fringe crackpot?
| GilKalai wrote:
| In the past five years I participated in a project (with Yosi
| Rinott and Tomer Shoham) to carefully examine the Google's 2019
| "supremacy" claim. A short introduction to our work is described
| here: https://gilkalai.wordpress.com/2024/12/09/the-case-
| against-g.... We found in that experiment statistically
| unreasonable predictions (predictions that were "too good to be
| true") indicating methodological flaws. We also found evidence of
| undocumented global optimization in the calibration process.
|
| In view of these and other findings my conclusion is that Google
| Quantum AI's claims (including published ones) should be
| approached with caution, particularly those of an extraordinary
| nature. These claims may stem from significant methodological
| errors and, as such, may reflect the researchers' expectations
| more than objective scientific reality.
| janpmz wrote:
| I've heared claims before that quantum computers are not real.
| But I didn't understand it. Can anybody explain the reasoning
| behind the criticism? Are they just simulated?
| Rhapso wrote:
| So the basics:
|
| - quantum physics are real, this isn't about debating that.
| The theory underpinning quantum computing is real.
|
| - quantum annealing is theoretically real, but not the same
| "breakthrough" that a quantum computer would be. Z-wave and
| google have made these.
|
| - All benchmark computations have been about simulating a
| smaller quantum computer or annealer. which these systems can
| do faster than a brute force classical search. These are
| literally the only situation where "quantum supremacy"
| exists.
|
| - There is literally no claim of "productive" computation
| being made by a quantum computer. Only simulations of our
| assumptions about quantum systems.
|
| - The critical gap is "quantum error correction", proof that
| they can use many error prone physical qubits to simulate a
| smaller system with lower error. There isn't proof yet that
| is actually possible.
|
| This result they are claiming, is they have "critical error
| correction" is the single most groundbreaking result we could
| have in quantum computing. Their evidence does not satisfy
| the burden of proof. They also only claim to have 1 qubit,
| which is intrinsically useless, and doesn't examine the costs
| of simulating multiple interacting qubits.
| sgt101 wrote:
| I think that this is now a very fringe position - the
| accumulation of reported evidence is such that if folks
| were/are fooling themselves it would now be a case of an
| entire community conspiring to keep things quiet. I mean,
| it's not impossible that could happen, but I think it would
| be extraordinary.
|
| On the other hand the question is what does "real QC" mean?
| The current QC's perform very limited and small computations,
| they lack things like quantum memory. The large versions are
| extremely impractical to use in the sense that they run for
| 1000ths of a second and take many hours to setup for a run.
| But that doesn't mean that the physical effects that they
| use/capture aren't real.
|
| Just a long long way from practical.
| whoitwas wrote:
| I'm skeptical only because they have AI in the name.
| attentionmech wrote:
| What does it mean when they say that the computations are
| happening in multiverse? I didn't know we are that advanced
| already :)
| attentionmech wrote:
| I don't know why i got downvoted. "It lends credence to the
| notion that quantum computation occurs in many parallel
| universes, in line with the idea that we live in a multiverse,
| a prediction first made by David Deutsch." -- this is from the
| article itself.
| raminf wrote:
| Relatives were asking for a basic explainer. Here's a good one by
| Hannah Fry: https://youtu.be/1_gJp2uAjO0
| crishoj wrote:
| Take the announcement with a grain of salt. From German physicist
| Sabine Hoffenfelder:
|
| > The particular calculation in question is to produce a random
| distribution. The result of this calculation has no practical
| use. > > They use this particular problem because it has been
| formally proven (with some technical caveats) that the
| calculation is difficult to do on a conventional computer
| (because it uses a lot of entanglement). That also allows them to
| say things like "this would have taken a septillion years on a
| conventional computer" etc. > > It's exactly the same calculation
| that they did in 2019 on a ca 50 qubit chip. In case you didn't
| follow that, Google's 2019 quantum supremacy claim was questioned
| by IBM pretty much as soon as the claim was made and a few years
| later a group said they did it on a conventional computer in a
| similar time.
|
| https://x.com/skdh/status/1866352680899104960
| l33tman wrote:
| TBH you need to take the _youtube influencer_ Sabine
| Hoffenfelder with a bigger grain of salt. She has converted to
| mainly posting clickbait youtube stuff over the last years
| (unfortunately, she was interesting to listen to earlier).
|
| The RCS is a common benchmark with no practical value, as is
| stated several times in the blog announcement as well. It's
| used because if a quantum computer can't do that, it can't do
| any other calculation either.
|
| The main contribution here seems to be what they indeed put
| first, which is the error correction scaling.
| falleng0d wrote:
| I have observed the change in approach to use aggressive
| (clickbaity) thumbnails, but I do think the quality of the
| content has not changed.
|
| And I can't blame her for adopting this trend, in many cases
| it is the difference between surviving or not on YouTube
| nowadays.
| dexterdog wrote:
| How would she not survive on YouTube? Would they block her
| posts if she didn't use a misleading title and thumbnail
| (shout-out to dearrow for those who despise this practice)?
| mrguyorama wrote:
| >Would they block her posts if she didn't use a
| misleading title and thumbnail
|
| So, the way youtube works is that every single creator is
| in an adversarial competition for your attention and
| time. More content is uploaded than can be consumed
| (profitably, from Youtube's point of view). Every video
| you watch is a "victory" for that video's creator, and a
| loss for many others.
|
| Every single time youtube shows you a screen full of
| thumbnails, it's running a race. Whichever video you pick
| will be shown to more users, while the videos you don't
| pick get punished and downranked in the algorithm. If a
| Youtube creator's video is shown to enough people without
| getting clicked on, ie has a low clickthrough rate, it
| literally stops being shown to people.
|
| Youtube will even do this to channels you have explicitly
| subscribed to, which they barely use as a signal for
| recommendations nowadays.
|
| Every single creator has said that clickbait thumbnails
| have better performance than otherwise. If other creators
| are using clickbait thumbnails, you will be at a natural
| disadvantage if you do not. There are not enough users
| who _hate_ clickbait to drive any sort of signal to the
| algorithm(s).
|
| If you as a creator have enough videos in a row that do
| not do well, you will find your entire channel basically
| stops getting recommended.
|
| It's entirely a tragedy of the commons problem: If every
| user stopped simultaneously, nobody would suffer, but any
| defectors would benefit, so they won't stop
| simultaneously.
|
| Youtube itself could trivially stop this, but in reality
| they love it, because they have absolutely run tests, and
| clickbait thumbnails drive more engagement than normal
| thumbnails. This is why they provide ample tooling to
| creators to A/B test thumbnails, help make better
| clickbait etc, and zero tooling around providing viewers
| a way to avoid clickbait thumbnails, which would be
| trivial to provide as an "alternative thumbnail" setting
| for creators and viewers.
|
| Sabine is literally driving herself down an anti-science
| echochamber though. Maybe she can't see it, but it's very
| clear from the outside what is happening. She has
| literally said that "90% of the science that your tax
| dollars pay for is bullshit" which is absurd hyperbole,
| and something that a PHYSICIST cannot say about all
| fields full stop. It's literally https://xkcd.com/793/
| Closi wrote:
| I think simplifying her to 'youtube influencer' is unfair -
| she is a doctor of theoretical physics with a specialism in
| quantum gravity who produces science content for youtube. She
| knows the field enough to comment.
|
| She doesn't even say that this isn't a big leap (she says
| it's very impressive - just not the sort of leap that means
| that there are now practical applications for quantum
| computers, and that a pinch of salt is required on the claim
| of comparisons to a conventional computer due to the 2019
| paper with a similar benchmark).
| pixelsort wrote:
| As a counterpoint, she recently reviewed a paper in one of
| her recent videos and completely tore it to shreds as
| apparently the math was full of absolute nonsense.
|
| This was a fascinating watch, and not the kind of content
| that is easy to find. Besides videos like that one, I enjoy
| her videos as fun way to absorb critical takes on interesting
| science news.
|
| Maybe she is controversial for being active and opinionated
| on social media, but we need more science influencers and
| educators like her, who don't just repeat the news without
| offering us context and interpretation.
| l33tman wrote:
| I think I know which you mean, but TBH that paper read as
| an AI auto-generated troll paper that any physics undergrad
| should be able to dissect :) It was a bit fun to watch
| though and sure sometimes you need to provide some fun
| content as well!
| zipy124 wrote:
| Just because she is a YouTuber doesn't diminish her other
| credentials, just as she is incetivised to do clickbait, so
| are actual scientific communication outlets such as nature,
| and the more clicky they are the more downloads and citation
| they will acquire. Incentives change content but don't
| directly detract from someone's expertise. See: the fact that
| most universities now publish some lectures on YouTube, it
| doesn't make the content any less true.
| cowl wrote:
| she was right the first time when they announced this in 2019
| and this time even they admit in their own press release:
|
| > Of course, as happened after we announced the first beyond-
| classical computation in 2019, we expect classical computers
| to keep improving on this benchmark
|
| As IBM showed their estimate of classical computer time is
| taken out of their a**es.
| perching_aix wrote:
| They explicitly cover all of these caveats in the announcement.
|
| Problems that benefit from quantum computing as far as I'm
| aware have their own formal language class, so it's also not
| like you have to consider Sabine's or any other person's
| thoughts and feelings on the subject - it is formally
| demonstrated that such problems exist.
|
| Whether the real world applications arrive or not, you can
| speculate for yourself. You really don't need to borrow the
| equally unsubstantiated opinion of someone else.
| eigenket wrote:
| The formal class is called BQP, in analogy with the classical
| complexity clas BPP. BQP contains BPP but there is no proof
| that it is stictly bigger (such a proof would imply P != NP).
| There are problems in BQP we expect are not in BPP but its
| not clear if there are any _useful_ problems in BQP and not
| in BPP, other than essentially Shor 's algorithm.
|
| On the other hand it's actually not completely necessary to
| have a superpolynomial quantum advantage in order to have
| some quantum advantage. A quantum computer running in
| quadratic time is still (probably) more useful than a
| classical computer running in O(n^100) time, even though
| they're both technically polynomial. An example of this is
| classical algorithms for simulating quantum circuits with
| bounded error whose runtime is like n^(1/eps) where eps is
| the error. If you pick eps=0.01 you've got a technically
| polynomial runtime classical algorithm but it's runtime is
| gonna be n^100, which is likely very large.
| chvid wrote:
| It would be interesting to see what "standard benchmark
| computation" was used and what its implementation would like in
| a traditional computer language.
|
| Does anyone know?
| vctrnk wrote:
| Not to defend Google, but they end up saying much the same:
|
| > The next challenge for the field is to demonstrate a first
| "useful, beyond-classical" computation on today's quantum chips
| that is relevant to a real-world application. We're optimistic
| that the Willow generation of chips can help us achieve this
| goal. So far, there have been two separate types of
| experiments. On the one hand, we've run the RCS benchmark,
| which measures performance against classical computers but has
| no known real-world applications. On the other hand, we've done
| scientifically interesting simulations of quantum systems,
| which have led to new scientific discoveries but are still
| within the reach of classical computers. Our goal is to do both
| at the same time -- to step into the realm of algorithms that
| are beyond the reach of classical computers and that are useful
| for real-world, commercially relevant problems.
| _joel wrote:
| But can it run Crysis?
| whiplash451 wrote:
| Newbie's question: how far is the RCS benchmark from a more
| practical challenge such as breaking RSA?
|
| The article concludes by saying that the former does not have
| practical applications. Why are they not using benchmarks that
| have some?
| Hilift wrote:
| There are already companies selling 5,000+ qubit quantum
| systems to the NSA. I would assume they are already using it
| for that in the huge data center in Utah.
| underdeserver wrote:
| Which companies? And how big an RSA key do 5,000+ qubit
| quantum systems break?
| makeworld wrote:
| Source?
| wasabi991011 wrote:
| Very far.
|
| I'm not sure how to put it quantitatively, but my impression
| from listening to experts give technical presentations is that
| the breaking-rsa-type algorithms are a decade or two away.
|
| This is very soon from a security perspective, as all you need
| is to store current data and break it in the future. But it is
| not soon enough to use for benchmarking current systems.
| ramonverse wrote:
| Can't wait for Google to release a breakthrough paper in 5 years
| just for the authors to leave and build OpenQuant
| machina_ex_deus wrote:
| You learn a lot by what isn't mentioned. Willow had 101 qubits in
| the quantum error correction experiment, yet only mere 67 qubits
| in the random circuit sampling experiment. Why did they not test
| random circuit sampling with the full set of qubits? Maybe when
| turning on the full 101 set of qubits, qubits fidelity dropped.
|
| Remember macroscopic objects have 10^23=2^76 particles, so until
| 76 qubits are reached and exceeded, I remain skeptical that the
| quantum system actually exploits an exponential Hilbert space,
| instead of the state being classically encoded by the particles
| somehow. I bet Google is struggling just at this threshold and
| they don't announce it.
| singlewind wrote:
| Now, this is really make other countries nervous. Basically,
| existing cryptography technology is in danger.
| cubefox wrote:
| Notice how the most interesting part, the image with their
| quantum computing roadmap, has too low a resolution to read the
| relevant text at the bottom. Come on Google.
| EGreg wrote:
| Any chance people will actually start reversing SHA1 hashes in
| the next few years? Is there any quantum algorithm for reversing
| one-way functions like that? (I mention SHA1 because they can
| find collissions.)
| yalogin wrote:
| Trying to understand how compute happens in Quantum computers. Is
| there a basic explanation of how superposition leads to
| computing?
|
| From chatgpt, "with n qubits a QC can be in a superposition of
| 2^n different states. This means that QCs can potentially perform
| computations on an exponential number of inputs at once"
|
| I don't get how the first sentence in that quote leads to the
| second one. Any pointers to read to understand this?
| johndhi wrote:
| Genuinely curious: does this make US regulators second-guess
| breaking up Google? Having a USA company be the first to develop
| quantum computing would be a major national security advantage.
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