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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

#161

Post by massung »

elAhmo wrote: post #13

Definitely not a quantum expert, but I have a feeling that news like this have been happening for more than a decade, without anything usable.

I’m no expert either, so I hope one can corroborate or correct me…

My understanding though is that these steps are really the very beginning. Using a quantum computer with quantum algorithms to prove that it’s possible.

Once proven (which maybe article this is claiming?) the next step is actually creating a computer with enough qubits and entanglable pairs and low enough error rates that it can be used to solve larger problems at scale.

Because my current understanding with claims like these is that they are likely true, but in the tiny.

It’d be like saying “I have a new algorithm for factoring primes that is 10000x faster than the current best, but can only factor numbers up to 103.”

Re: Willow quantum chip demonstrates verifiable quantum advantage on hardware

#164

Post by guywithahat »

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…

I meant Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert. The joke is just that they have similar names, and Adams does a lot of political/topical commentary in both his comics and podcast but isn't a good source since a lot of his work is comedy focused.

I am unaware of any comics Aaronson made and I don't blame him for anything he did make or was loosely associated with. It is incredible to the extend people are willing to go to claim people are crazy though, both in regards to Adams and Aaronson.

Re: Willow quantum chip demonstrates verifiable quantum advantage on hardware

#165

Post by Dylan16807 »

refulgentis wrote: post #140
fwip wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 qua…

Good point, I guess that's why I find this comments section boring and not representative of the HN I've known for 16 years: there's a sort of half-remembering it wasn't powerful enough to do something plainly and obviously useful yesterday. Then, we ignore today, and launder that into a gish-gallop of free-association, torturing the meaning of words to shoehorn in the idea that all the science has it wrong and inter…

If you assume everyone else is wrong from the start, then you won't like the comments, sure.

And what the hell are you calling a gish gallop? They wrote four sentences explaining a single simple argument. If you design a way to make qubits emulate particle interactions, that's a useful tool, but it's not what people normally think of as a "computer".

And whatever you're saying about anyone claiming "all the science has it wrong" is an argument that only exists inside your own head.

Re: Willow quantum chip demonstrates verifiable quantum advantage on hardware

#166

Post by jonas21 »

rowanG077 wrote: post #137
ortusdux wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

How is an accompanying publication in nature worth anything in this context?

It's unlikely that it would be accepted for publication in a top peer-reviewed journal if there wasn't something novel.

Re: Willow quantum chip demonstrates verifiable quantum advantage on hardware

#167

Post by adgjlsfhk1 »

msm_ wrote: post #158
adgjlsfhk1 wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Grover's algorithm is sqrt(N) wrt domain size and the key is part of the domain of the function.

Re: Willow quantum chip demonstrates verifiable quantum advantage on hardware

#169

Post by hshdhdhehd »

portaouflop wrote: post #122
Bootvis wrote: post #2

This seems like an actually useful computation to do, unlike earlier results. Is that a reasonable reading of this article?

No it’s still completely useless for the real world. Also not actually verifiable

Classic quantum
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