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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

#151

Post by AndrewStephens »

adonovan wrote: post #131
AndrewStephens wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "These results ... indicate a viable path to practical quantum advantage" I'll add this to my list of useful phrases. Q: Hey AndrewStephens, you promised that task would be completed two days ago. Can you finish it today? A: Results indicate a viable path to success.

Not quite sure why all the responses here are so cynical. I mean, it's a genuinely difficult set of problems, so of course the first steps will be small. Today's computers are the result of 80 astonishing years of sustained innovation by millions of brilliant people. Even as a Googler I can find plenty of reasons to be cynical about Google (many involving AI), but the quantum computing research lab is not one of them…

I completed my degree in computer science at age 22 - at that time Shor had just published his famous algorithm and the industry press was filled with articles on how quantum computing was just a few years away with just a few technical hurdles yet to be solved.

I turned 50 years old this year, forgive an old man a few chuckles.

Re: Willow quantum chip demonstrates verifiable quantum advantage on hardware

#152

Post by nicce »

ortusdux wrote: post #4
einsteinx2 wrote: post #3

> demonstrates the first-ever algorithm to achieve verifiable quantum advantage on hardware. Am I crazy or have I heard this same announcement from Google and others like 5 times at this point?

I'd classify this one as different as it accompanies a publication in Nature - https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09526-6

I think it was in Nature last time as well…

Re: Willow quantum chip demonstrates verifiable quantum advantage on hardware

#153

Post by nicce »

jonathanstrange wrote: post #32
kantbtrue wrote: post #26

“13,000× faster” sounds huge, but I wonder what it’s being compared to. Quantum speedups are always tricky to measure

The article states: “...13,000 times faster on Willow than the best classical algorithm on one of the world’s fastest supercomputers...” I agree it's not very precise without knowing which of the world's fastest supercomputers they're talking about, but there was no need to leave out this tidbit.

I don’t understand how these papers get accepted

Re: Willow quantum chip demonstrates verifiable quantum advantage on hardware

#155

Post by chermi »

nashashmi wrote: post #10

Before the mega monopolies took over, corps used to partner with universities to conduct this kind of research. Now we have bloated salaries, rich corporations, and expensive research while having under experienced graduates. These costs will get forwarded to the consumer. The future won’t have a lot of things that we have come to expect.

Did you bother looking at the author list? This is a grand statement that's easily refuted by just looking.

Maybe you're thinking specifically of LLM labs. I agree this is happening there, but I wouldn't be as dramatic. Everywhere else, university-corporation/government lab partnerships are still going very strong.

Re: Willow quantum chip demonstrates verifiable quantum advantage on hardware

#156

Post by [deleted] »

cma wrote: post #136
amiga386 wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The text adventure guy, or the cartoonist who went batshit?

Aaronson isn't a cartoonist, it was an AI cartoon from ChatGPT that an antisemite sent Aaronson in the mail which he then seemingly maliciously misattributed to Woit making people assume Aaronson went batshit. https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=9098 Aaronson did work at OpenAI but not on image generation, maybe you could argue the OpenAI safety team he worked on should be involved here but I'm pretty sure image generation…

[deleted]

Re: Willow quantum chip demonstrates verifiable quantum advantage on hardware

#157

Post by chermi »

bilsbie wrote: post #51
ransom1538 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SO... BTC goes to zero?

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?

Hey, why are you bringing the kids into this! ;) "The majority of minors"

Re: Willow quantum chip demonstrates verifiable quantum advantage on hardware

#158

Post by msm_ »

adgjlsfhk1 wrote: post #98
jonathanstrange wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The rule of thumb is that a working quantum computer that can run Grover's algorithm reduces the security of a symmetric cipher to half of its key size. That is, AES-128 should be considered to have a 64 bit key size, which is why it's not considered "quantum-safe." Edit: An effective key space of 2^64 is not secure according to modern-day standards. It was secure at the times of DES.

AES-128 is quantum safe (more or less). 64 bit security in the classical domain isn't safe because you can parallelize across 2^20 computers trivially. Grover gives you 2^64 AES operations on a quantum coputer (probably ~2^70 gates or so before error correction or ~2^90 after error correction) that can't be parallelized efficiently. AES-128 is secure for the next century (but you might as well switch to aes-256 becau…

Is AES-256 more quantum resistant? It still has 16byte block size, so intuitively it should be equally vulnerable to Grover.

Re: Willow quantum chip demonstrates verifiable quantum advantage on hardware

#159

Post by leoc »

pred_ wrote: post #144
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.

Normally, where I come from anyway, verifiability would refer to the ability to prove to a classical skeptic that the quantum device did what it's supposed to, cf. e.g. Mahadev ( https://arxiv.org/abs/1804.01082 ), Aaronson ( https://arxiv.org/abs/2209.06930 ), in a strong, theoretical, sense. And that's indeed relevant in the context of proving advantage, as the earlier RCS experiments lacked that ability, so “demon…

So the Scott Aaronson Full Employment Conjecture remains unrefuted?
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