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Large-scale quantum chip validated

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Re: Large-scale quantum chip validated

#11

Post by frisco »

I've been thinking this for a while and have really come to believe it recently, but I'd be amazed if the NSA didn't have quantum computing down, either at scale or about to get there. Historically they've been, and similar organizations are perceived to be, 5-10 years ahead of public technology, so I'm going to go ahead and assume that all PKE is broken as far as the USG is concerned.

I've heard from someone who'd know that a big driver of Google's purchase of the D-Wave was that, "if there's going to be a crypto breakthrough, [Google] would like to know about it early."

Re: Large-scale quantum chip validated

#12

Post by mtgx »

frisco wrote: post #11

I've been thinking this for a while and have really come to believe it recently, but I'd be amazed if the NSA didn't have quantum computing down, either at scale or about to get there. Historically they've been, and similar organizations are perceived to be, 5-10 years ahead of public technology, so I'm going to go ahead and assume that all PKE is broken as far as the USG is concerned. I've heard from someone who'd k…

Google got in on this early:

> On February 13, 2007, D-Wave demonstrated the Orion system, running three different applications at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. This marked the first public demonstration of, supposedly, a quantum computer and associated service.

> On Tuesday, December 8, 2009 at the Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS) conference, a Google research team led by Hartmut Neven used D-Wave's processor to train a binary image classifier.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D-Wave_Systems

We can only hope quantum computers become commercially available as soon as possible, and many companies use them to encrypt the data and with perfect forward secrecy, that can at least provide some kind of protection against too many government abuses.

Because we're not going to be able to buy these ourselves in the next few decades, while the governments will be able to get as many as they want. So our only "hope" is that many companies can get them early, too, to protect their services against any type of "attacker".

Re: Large-scale quantum chip validated

#13

Post by comex »

mtgx wrote: post #12
frisco wrote: post #11

I've been thinking this for a while and have really come to believe it recently, but I'd be amazed if the NSA didn't have quantum computing down, either at scale or about to get there. Historically they've been, and similar organizations are perceived to be, 5-10 years ahead of public technology, so I'm going to go ahead and assume that all PKE is broken as far as the USG is concerned. I've heard from someone who'd k…

Google got in on this early: > On February 13, 2007, D-Wave demonstrated the Orion system, running three different applications at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. This marked the first public demonstration of, supposedly, a quantum computer and associated service. > On Tuesday, December 8, 2009 at the Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS) conference, a Google research team led by Hart…

Since quantum cryptography requires a special physical connection between the two parties, it wouldn't be particularly effective at securing the all-important SSL traffic. Luckily, I highly doubt practical use of Shor's algorithm will be possible publicly in 5-10 years, but even if it will, it's not necessary to use quantum cryptography to defend against quantum computers:

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-quantum_cryptography

Re: Large-scale quantum chip validated

#16

Post by i_am_dead »

beloch wrote: post #9
chacham15 wrote: post #2

Does this mean that I need to throw away my 2048-bit RSA key? Is 4096 bit at all safer than 2048 from quantum computing?

That depends... The D-Wave processor probably isn't useful for cracking it. However, if you send RSA encrypted data, copies can be made of the encrypted data and cracked at a later date when better facilities or algorithms become available. If you wish to send a message that would make the NSA want to hunt you down and kill you if they decrypt it N years from now (and you plan to live >N years), you should probably b…

I'm willing to bet that N is a single digit.

Re: Large-scale quantum chip validated

#18

Post by shadowmint »

damian2000 wrote: post #6

Anyone know how they program these?.. something like QCL? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_programming

Recommend reading: http://www.amazon.com/Quantum-Computing-since-Democritus-Aar...

Lots of interesting stuff about quantum computing and quantum algorithms in there. Some interesting tidbits:

    - var x; var y = x 
    - print(x)
And:

    - var y
    - var x = f(y)
I'm sure some QPL's will build this sort of stuff in so you don't have to worry about it, but definitely interesting reading~

(this is probably more directly relevant to programming though, and free: http://sneezy.cs.nott.ac.uk/qml/compiler/jjg-thesis.pdf)

Re: Large-scale quantum chip validated

#19

Post by nraynaud »

karpathy wrote: post #10
some_guy_there wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The machine solves QUBO problem. You program in the Q_ij and a set of X's is returned as answer. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quadratic_unconstrained_binary_...

(Also equivalently and more commonly known as the Ising Model). The D-wave chip is just a very fast hardware-based Ising model solver. You can use it to both find the minimum of a problem through cooling, or by controlling the temperature of the system you can also do sampling. And since so many important problems can be reduced to an Ising model, this is interesting. What I don't fully understand is why is it so imp…

Some prior paper demonstrated that a carefully crafter computer program was as fast as this machine, and I think they did not believe the Q system would get asymptotically faster.

Re: Large-scale quantum chip validated

#20

Post by Osmium »

frisco wrote: post #11

I've been thinking this for a while and have really come to believe it recently, but I'd be amazed if the NSA didn't have quantum computing down, either at scale or about to get there. Historically they've been, and similar organizations are perceived to be, 5-10 years ahead of public technology, so I'm going to go ahead and assume that all PKE is broken as far as the USG is concerned. I've heard from someone who'd k…

You know, it's not impossible, but as someone who works in a field peripheral to quantum computing I would be surprised. There are two types of problems in science, the attrition kind where if you throw enough people and enough money at it you'll get it to work and the breakthrough kind where nothing will happen until some a-ha moment. I suspect quantum computing is more of the latter right now; there are just too many outstanding issues for a large-scale device. But who knows, I may be wrong.

Regarding D-Wave specifically, there's plenty of commentary around on what they're doing...

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