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Willow quantum chip demonstrates verifiable quantum advantage on hardware

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Re: Willow quantum chip demonstrates verifiable quantum advantage on hardware

#111

Post by cyberpunk »

chuckadams wrote: post #110
cyberpunk wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, if a bank gets compromised you could in theory DOS a clearing house, but I'd be completely amazed if it succeeded. Those kind of anomalous spikes would be detected quickly. Not even imagining that each bank probably has dedicated instances inside each clearing house. These are fairly robust systems. You'd likely have a much better impact dossing the banks.

Yah, I suspect the banks pay a handsome sum to smarter people than you and me, and they've gamed this out already.

I build such systems ;)

Re: Willow quantum chip demonstrates verifiable quantum advantage on hardware

#112

Post by cwmma »

bossyTeacher wrote: post #104

Afaik we are a decade or two away from quantum supremacy. All the AI monks, forget that if AI is the future, quantum supremacy is the present. And whoever controls the present, decides the future. Rememeber, it is not about quantum general computing, it's about implementing the quantum computation of Shor's algorithm

but much like AI hype quantum hype is also way over played, yeah modern asymmetric encryption will be less secure, but even after you have quantum computers that can do Shor's algorithm it might be a while before there are quantum computers affordable enough for it to be an actual threat (i.e. it's not cheaper to just buy a zero day for the target's phone or something).

But since we already have post quantum algorithms, the end state of cheap quantum computers is just a new equilibrium where people use the new algorithms and they can't be directly cracked and it's basically the same except maybe you can decrypt historical stuff but who knows if it's worth it.

Re: Willow quantum chip demonstrates verifiable quantum advantage on hardware

#114

Post by EvgeniyZh »

FabHK wrote: post #100

So, "verifiable" here means "we ran it twice and got the same result"? > Quantum verifiability means the result can be repeated on our quantum computer — or any other of the same caliber — to get the same answer, confirming the result.

It is not very clear from the text and from what I can say there is no "verifiability" concept in the papers they link.

I think what they are trying to do is to contrast these to previous quantum advantage experiments in the following sense.

The previous experiments involve sampling from some distribution, which is believed to be classically hard. However, it is a non-trivial question whether you succeed or fail in this task. Having perfect sampler from the same distribution won't allow you to easily verify the samples.

On the other hand these experiments involve measuring some observable, i.e., the output is just a number and you could compare it to the value obtained in a different way (one a different or same computer or even some analog experimental system).

Note that these observables are expectation values of the samples, but in the previous experiments since the circuits are random, all the expectation values are very close to zero and it is impossible to actually resolve them from the experiment.

Disclaimer: this is my speculation about what they mean because they didn't explain it anywhere from what I can see.

Re: Willow quantum chip demonstrates verifiable quantum advantage on hardware

#116

Post by toasted-subs »

bawolff wrote: post #71
toasted-subs wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A consistent theme of Quantum Computing is setting up the problem to have the hardwired achieve nicely to get a good news article to get more funding. Im pretty reluctant to make any negative comments about these kinds of posts be cause it will prevent actually achieving the desired outcome.

Quantum computing hardware is still at its infancy. The problem is not with these papers (or at least not ones like this one) but how they are reported. If quantum computing is going to suceed it needs to do the baby steps before it can do the big steps, and at the current rate the big leaps are probably decades away. There is nothing wrong with that, its a hard problem and its going to take time. But then the press…

There in lies the problem. Hey can I have a few billion dollars for my baby doesn't really work out too well for investors or industry.

The current situation with "AI" took off because people learned their lessons from the last round of funding cuts "AI winter".

That being said any pushback against funding quantum research would be like chopped your own hands off.

Re: Willow quantum chip demonstrates verifiable quantum advantage on hardware

#118

Post by logtrees »

ransom1538 wrote: post #25
lisper wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why wait? Just go read the paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09526-6 In the last sentence of the abstract you will find: "These results ... indicate a viable path to practical quantum advantage." And in the conclusions: "Although the random circuits used in the dynamic learning demonstration remain a toy model for Hamiltonians that are of practical relevance, the scheme is readily applicable to real p…

SO... BTC goes to zero?

No, I don't think so. By the time quantum supremacy is really achieved for a "Q-Day" that could affect them or things like them, the existing blockchains which have already been getting hardened will have gotten even harder. Quantum computing could be used to further harden them, as well, rather than compromise them. Supposing that Q-Day brought any temporary hurdles to Bitcoin or Ethereum or related blockchains, well...due to their underlying nature resulting in justified Permanence, we would be able to simply reconstitute and redeploy them for their functionalities because they've already been sufficiently imbued with value and institutional interest as well. These are quantum-resistant hardenings.

So I do not think these tools or economic substrate layers are going anywhere. They are very valuable for the particular kinds of applications that can be built with them and also as additional productive layers to the credit and liquidity markets nationally, internationally, and also globally/universally.

So there is a lot of institutional interest, including governance interest, in using them to build better systems. Bitcoin on its own would be reduced in such justification but because of Ethereum's function as an engine which can drive utility, the two together are a formidable and quantum-resistant platform that can scale into the hundreds of trillions of dollars and in Ethereum's case...certainly beyond $1Q in time.

I'm very bullish on the underlying technology, even beyond tokenomics for any particular project. The underlying technologies are powerful protocols that facilitate the development and deployment of Non Zero Sum systems at scale. With Q-Day not expected until end of 2020s or beginning of 2030s, that is a considerable amount of time (in the tech world) to lay the ground work for further hardening and discussions around this.

Re: Willow quantum chip demonstrates verifiable quantum advantage on hardware

#119

Post by fwip »

refulgentis wrote: post #88
TeeMassive wrote: post #72

The last time I heard a similar news from Google, it turned out they were solving a quantum phenomenon using a quantum phenomenon. It seems to be the same pattern here. Not to say it's not progress, but kind of feels like overhyped.

Idk. I get this is the median take across many comments, I don’t mean to be disagreeable with a crowd. But I don’t know why using quantum phenomena is a sign something’s off. It’s a quantum computer! But I know something is off with this take if it didn’t strike you that way.

To me, it matters because it's a sign that it might not be particularly transferable as a method of computation.

A wind tunnel is a great tool for solving aerodynamics and fluid flow problems, more efficiently than a typical computer. But we don't call it a wind-computer, because it's not a useful tool outside of that narrow domain.

The promise of quantum computing is that it can solve useful problems outside the quantum realm - like breaking traditional encryption.

Re: Willow quantum chip demonstrates verifiable quantum advantage on hardware

#120

Post by shwaj »

udev4096 wrote: post #109
bilsbie wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t see why bitcoin wouldn’t update its software in such a case. The majority of minors just need to agree. But why wouldn’t they if the alternative is going to zero?

The problem is all the lost BTC wallets, which is speculated to be a lot and also one of the biggest reason for the current BTC price , who obviously cannot upgrade to PQ. There is currently a radical proposal of essentially making all those lost wallets worthless, unless they migrate [1] [1] - https://github.com/jlopp/bips/blob/quantum_migration/bip-pos...

I’m not sure there’s a better alternative.
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