21–28 of 28 posts
I find that this is a great reaction to someone finding a bug in your paper. No trying to cover it up, but straight-up admitting a mistake. Also, the fact that he leaves the paper out because it does contain novel ideas that might be useful for further research is cool.
I find it amazing someone can even read and follow all the formulas and find a bug
The CV of Thomas Vidick, one of the two people that found the bug, is quite impressive. Undergrad at ENS in France (ranked 1st), PhD at Berkeley (3.97/4.0), postdoc at MIT under Scott Aaronson, and now full professor at Caltech. He literally wrote a book on the topic (Introduction to Quantum Cryptography). So, yeah.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89cole_normale_sup%C3%A9ri...
Someone more familiar can correct me if I am wrong.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The CV of Thomas Vidick, one of the two people that found the bug, is quite impressive. Undergrad at ENS in France (ranked 1st), PhD at Berkeley (3.97/4.0), postdoc at MIT under Scott Aaronson, and now full professor at Caltech. He literally wrote a book on the topic (Introduction to Quantum Cryptography). So, yeah.
The other person to find the bug is currently a PhD student, which is more impressive. They beat all the other experts reading the paper.
I find it amazing someone can even read and follow all the formulas and find a bug
They have spent thousands, if not tens of thousands, of hours building this skill set. It's like saying "I find it amazing that someone can play Scriabin's piano sonata no. 5 perfectly".
Condolences to the author, but this is a huge relief. A polytime quantum algorithm for LWE would have been a scary prospect for the future of asymmetric key crypto. (Not to mention all the other cool stuff people are building on top like fully homomorphic encryption.) Even if it wasn't quite fast enough to break the current schemes that NIST is standardizing, I (and I'm sure many others) would much prefer those probl…
Not only that Yilei annotated with the bug his paper(p37):
"Yilei (April 18) Here is the bug: the amplitude of |φ8.f ⟩ does not satisfy M/2 -periodicity. Another way of explaining the bug is: the support of |φ8.f ⟩ contains p1...pκ vectors. After domain extension, we should have got p1p2...pκ · p2...pκ vectors, but as the way |φ8.g⟩ is written, it only contains p1...pκ vectors. So the expression of |φ8.g⟩ is wrong."
As far as I know, the problems underpinning post-quantum cryptography have not yet enjoyed such extensive scrutiny / search for efficient (regular or quantum) algorithms.
In other words: stuff that is hoped to be post-quantum might turn out to be quantum -- or even in a feasible non-quantum class. The latter seems unlikely barring p=np-alike breakthroughs, but even these cannot fully be ruled out.
I find it amazing someone can even read and follow all the formulas and find a bug
The CV of Thomas Vidick, one of the two people that found the bug, is quite impressive. Undergrad at ENS in France (ranked 1st), PhD at Berkeley (3.97/4.0), postdoc at MIT under Scott Aaronson, and now full professor at Caltech. He literally wrote a book on the topic (Introduction to Quantum Cryptography). So, yeah.