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Cargo Cult Quantum Factoring

scottaaronson.blog

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Re: Cargo Cult Quantum Factoring

#41

Post by biomcgary »

ramraj07 wrote: post #28
yalue wrote: post #14

One of the most fun (?) parts of academia is the unique blend of frustration and satisfaction that results when a shoddy paper somehow clears peer review only to get eviscerated when it lands on the desk of an actual expert. "the detailed exploration of irrelevancies" LOL, if that isn't a "time-tested" method for making a paper sound academic, I don't know what is.

This is not always the case. SA and Sabine, are the hyper rare outliers in this regard. Fields like biology have no such folks for variety of reasons (I’m counting out some celebrities involved in pointing out actual misconduct instead of sloppy work).

Biology has so many exceptions and idiosyncrasies compared to physics that being broadly competent is difficult.

Physics found the "zoo" of diverse particles to be inelegant (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Particle_zoo). In biology, actual zoos hold a small fraction of diversity at the organismal level. The diversity at the molecular level is insanely high and the vast majority of "rules" have exceptions. Even the Central Dogma of Molecular Biology (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_dogma_of_molecular_bio...) is a bit messy, unless stated fairly carefully (e.g., https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24965874/).

Re: Cargo Cult Quantum Factoring

#42

Post by ablatt89 »

It looks like the paper specifically claims to create an optimized quantum algorithm for SR pair finding which is most time consuming part the Schnorr fatoring algorithm. It starts with a classical computational lattice problem, defines the optimization problem in a specific form (3), and then maps it to a Hamiltonian to represent a lattice matrix and a PauliZ matrix ((1, 0), (0, -1)) (4) and if we have a Hamiltonian, we can create a QC.

The proof of the reduced memory complexity is linked in section 31 but it is really long winded however, it seems the classical Schnorr lattice reduction problem for factoring integers has a space complexity of O((logN)^(α)/α*loglogN)) which according to the author, since the paper can map SR pair finding (the time consuming piece of Schnorr's algorithm) to a Hamiltonian, we then have a quantum factoring algorithm of the same complexity.

Seems pretty handwavy to me.

Re: Cargo Cult Quantum Factoring

#43

Post by TchoBeer »

qwezxcrty wrote: post #29
adamsmith143 wrote: post #23

I did graduate work in Materials Science and the understanding in our lab was to be very skeptical of papers from China, particularly from the State Key Labs as they were very often impossible to replicate and ended up being useless. Seems relevant to this paper as well.

[flagged]

There are tons, literally hundreds of Chinese-Americans and Chinese-Europeans and Chinese immigrants living all over the world who do research, and their work is not at all suspect. The reason why Chinese papers are suspect has to do with the academic and financial incentives which exist in the modern day People's Republic of China. With that being said, it's definitely possible that Chinese papers are perceived as suspect for racist reasons as well.

Re: Cargo Cult Quantum Factoring

#44

Post by fsh »

krastanov wrote: post #40
dekhn wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The bullshit ratio in quantum computing is the highest I've seen in any field, followed only by ML (the difference being that there is ML non-bullshit, while quantum computing hasn't been shown to be useful for any real problem, but there have been huge advances in the underlying technologies).

Quantum sensing is a pretty huge *practical* advance that is due to the overall work of Quantum Information Science (computing included).

To my knowledge the only "practical" application of quantum sensing so far has been the use of squeezed light in some gravitational wave detectors. However, this has absolutely nothing to do with quantum information science. Getting an actual advantage out of quantum effects has so far been remarkably difficult.

Re: Cargo Cult Quantum Factoring

#46

Post by Bootvis »

chowells wrote: post #38
0xf00ff00f wrote: post #33

In the original paper they claim to have factored a 48-bit number with an implementation of their algorithm. Did they use some kind of trick?

Why would they need to have done so? The blog post argues there's no evidence this is any faster than classical Schnorr's algorithm, and classical Schnorr's algorithm can easily factor a 48-bit number. And as the post also makes very sure to point out, Schnorr != Shor.

Shnorr != Schnorr

Re: Cargo Cult Quantum Factoring

#47

Post by NotYourLawyer »

qwezxcrty wrote: post #29
adamsmith143 wrote: post #23

I did graduate work in Materials Science and the understanding in our lab was to be very skeptical of papers from China, particularly from the State Key Labs as they were very often impossible to replicate and ended up being useless. Seems relevant to this paper as well.

[flagged]

China the country, not Chinese the race. They’re not the same, and it’s not racism to throw shade at a country that deserves shade.

Re: Cargo Cult Quantum Factoring

#49

Post by dekhn »

krastanov wrote: post #40
dekhn wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The bullshit ratio in quantum computing is the highest I've seen in any field, followed only by ML (the difference being that there is ML non-bullshit, while quantum computing hasn't been shown to be useful for any real problem, but there have been huge advances in the underlying technologies).

Quantum sensing is a pretty huge *practical* advance that is due to the overall work of Quantum Information Science (computing included).

I think it's a stretch to relate that to quantum computing, which normally describes making systems that can... well, compute! Quantum sensing is more an application of quantum theory and exploitation of quantum effects to improve photonics applications.

Re: Cargo Cult Quantum Factoring

#50

Post by [deleted] »

ablatt89 wrote: post #42

It looks like the paper specifically claims to create an optimized quantum algorithm for SR pair finding which is most time consuming part the Schnorr fatoring algorithm. It starts with a classical computational lattice problem, defines the optimization problem in a specific form (3), and then maps it to a Hamiltonian to represent a lattice matrix and a PauliZ matrix ((1, 0), (0, -1)) (4) and if we have a Hamiltonian…

[deleted]
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