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Quantum computing bombshells that are not April Fools

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Re: Quantum computing bombshells that are not April Fools

#61

Post by Foobar8568 »

Overpower0416 wrote: post #55
falcor84 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The whole thing is that we have proofs that this is possible, and have been seeing continuous engineering progress. Having followed this for awhile, it seems to me that saying quantum computing is "still impossible" at this stage is like saying that GTA VI is still impossible, based on its unpredictable timelines.

Sorry, I meant a quantum computer that is actually built where these theories can actually be applied. Current quantum computers are as useful as current nuclear fusion reactors. I am just over any sensational headlines from the past 10 years. They really need to drop a tweet like "Check out my quantum computer that is actually useful" like Sam Altman did with GPT to convince me.

At this stage, it's more like Musk and self driving cars, but at least QC around the corner is from mid 1990s

Re: Quantum computing bombshells that are not April Fools

#62

Post by falcor84 »

Overpower0416 wrote: post #55
falcor84 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The whole thing is that we have proofs that this is possible, and have been seeing continuous engineering progress. Having followed this for awhile, it seems to me that saying quantum computing is "still impossible" at this stage is like saying that GTA VI is still impossible, based on its unpredictable timelines.

Sorry, I meant a quantum computer that is actually built where these theories can actually be applied. Current quantum computers are as useful as current nuclear fusion reactors. I am just over any sensational headlines from the past 10 years. They really need to drop a tweet like "Check out my quantum computer that is actually useful" like Sam Altman did with GPT to convince me.

Well yes, but this is research - it progresses gradually and incrementally until eventually it is ready to be deployed. I for one am really interested in following these progress updates, rather than just being surprised when it finally drops. In particular, I find the recommendation to switch to quantum-resistant technology to be very important.

Re: Quantum computing bombshells that are not April Fools

#63

Post by pathOf_aFineMan »

bawolff wrote: post #15
tombert wrote: post #3

Here's hoping that my stock for D-Wave ends up being worth something. Quantum computing seems super cool, but I've been a little skeptical of it actually ever yielding anything useful. I would love to be wrong, it seems neat, and I have read through a few books on the subject and played with simulators, so I'm not completely talking out of my ass here, but quantum as a whole has kind of felt like vaporware to me. As…

D-Wave is not making the type of quantum computers these breakthroughs would apply to, even if scaled up, as far as i know.

They recently bought a more gate based quantum computing company [1]

[1] https://www.dwavequantum.com/company/newsroom/press-release/...

Re: Quantum computing bombshells that are not April Fools

#64

Post by tsimionescu »

sMarsIntruder wrote: post #34
GeoSys wrote: post #9

So does BTC need to hard fork? Good luck getting to a consensus again ...

I’m impressed by the BTC obsession: this will definitely impact the banking sector as a whole even before. Quantum FUD, here we come.

The banking sector can relatively trivially move to a new encryption scheme - this is one of the huge advantages of centralized systems. Also, the banking sector, rather than trying to provide anonymity/pseudonimity, has KYC - they can relatively simply disable remote access if they think a current system is no longer secure, and get everyone to come in to a physical office and get a secure version, after manually verifying they are the rightful holder of the account.

Tldr; Bitcoin relies entirely on encryption, banking does not. So broken encryption is a catastrophe for Bitcoin, but just a bad week for banking.

Re: Quantum computing bombshells that are not April Fools

#65

Post by pathOf_aFineMan »

AlexCoventry wrote: post #11
esseph wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can rent Quantum computing time from IBM cloud today: https://www.ibm.com/quantum/products https://quantum.cloud.ibm.com/docs/en/guides/plans-overview I have NOT used it, but the idea is interesting.

You can rent it, but it's basically worthless at this stage.

there's still a long road to commercial applications but today's hardware is simulating quantum systems beyond the scale of classical methods, for example [1]; an interesting line of work opposite to this can be found in those who improve classical methods towards such examples [2], but these are only developed because of the existing quantum hardware

Really though, today's IBM hardware is good fun to play with, eg for generating moderately large GHZ states

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.26845 [2]https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.14887

Re: Quantum computing bombshells that are not April Fools

#67

Post by i2km »

cyberpunk wrote: post #59
bawolff wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If Bitcoin is broken then your bank encryption and everything else is broken also. Its a lot easier for your bank to change encryption methods than it is for bitcoin. Presumably you mean TLS here (where else do banks use encryption? Disk encryption?). People are already deploying experiments with quantum-proof TLS. > As far as I know quantum computers still can't even honestly factor 7x3=21, so you are good. And th…

I still don’t really get the argument, like okay this extremely rich theoretical attacker can obtain the private key for the cert my service uses, and somehow they’re able to sniff my traffic and could then somehow extract creds. But that doesn’t give them my 2fa which is needed to book each transaction, and as soon as these attacks are in the wild anti fraud/surveillance systems will be in much harder mode. I don’t…

It’s turning into a bit of a grift now. So many crypto agility “consultants “ popping up with their slop graphics. Never mind the fact that even if a relevant quantum computer is built it will still cost the user millions of dollars to break each RSA key pair…

Re: Quantum computing bombshells that are not April Fools

#68

Post by northlondoner »

Note that. The primary mechanism in error-correction paper is "selective quantum observations". It means we don't need to use all available resource but selectively error-correct. Similar idea is also recently explored in quantum chaos, whereby system is still chaotic but localisation can be observed in the ancillary system.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.22169v3

Re: Quantum computing bombshells that are not April Fools

#69

Post by crispyambulance »

eru wrote: post #45
crispyambulance wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I got some too. Obviously the principles behind quantum computing are perfectly sound. It's just those pesky engineering obstacles. One of the companies around today or in the near future will be the one who makes it work at a practical scale. It will have enormous impact, but I think it will be a slow-burn kind of thing as making effective use of quantum computers will take a long time to evolve, IMHO. Unfortunately…

You might benefit from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Index_fund

I do, sport, like everybody else.

Re: Quantum computing bombshells that are not April Fools

#70

Post by northlondoner »

northlondoner wrote: post #68

Note that. The primary mechanism in error-correction paper is "selective quantum observations". It means we don't need to use all available resource but selectively error-correct. Similar idea is also recently explored in quantum chaos, whereby system is still chaotic but localisation can be observed in the ancillary system. https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.22169v3

Related phenomenon is quantum Zeno Effect, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_Zeno_effect Zeno Effect appears over selective observation, rather than selective states.
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