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Willow, Our Quantum Chip

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Re: Willow, Our Quantum Chip

#221

Post by Lionga »

layer8 wrote: post #195
jawns wrote: post #8

> It lends credence to the notion that quantum computation occurs in many parallel universes, in line with the idea that we live in a multiverse I see the evidence, and I see the conclusion, but there's a lot of ellipses between the evidence and the conclusion. Do quantum computing folks really think that we are borrowing capacity from other universes for these calculations?

The Schrödinger equation inherently contains a multiverse. The disagreement is about whether the wave function described by the equation collapses to a single universe upon measurement (i.e. whether the equation stops holding upon measurement), or whether the different branches continue to exist (i.e. the equation continues to hold at all times), each with a different measurement outcome. Regardless, between measurem…

Non of that honkey ponkey is needed if you just give up locality and a hard deterministic explanation like De-Broglie-Bohm gives all the same correct measurements and conclusions like Copenhagen interpretation without multiverses and "wave function collapses".

Copenhagen interpretation is just "easier" (like oops all our calculations about the univers don't seemt to fit, lets invent "dark matter") when the correct explanations makes any real world calculation practically impossible (thus ending most of physics further study) as any atom depends on every other atom at any time.

Re: Willow, Our Quantum Chip

#223

Post by K0balt »

npalli wrote: post #205
vessenes wrote: post #18

I’m a quantum dabbler so I’ll throw out an armchair reaction: this is a significant announcement. My memory is that 256 bit keys in non quantum resistant algos need something like 2500 qubits or so; and by that I mean generally useful programmable qubits. To show a bit over 100 qubits with stability, meaning the information survives a while, long enough to be read, and general enough to run some benchmarks on is some…

> Worth spending a little time doing some long tail strategizing I’d say. Yup, like Bitcoin going to zero.

I think you’re going to need about 10,000,000 qbits to divert a transaction, but that’s still within foreseeable scale. I think it’s extreme likely that the foundation will have finished their quantum resistance planning before we get to 10MM coherent qbits, but still, it’s a potential scenario.

More likely that other critical infrastructure failures will happen within trad-finance, much larger vulnerability footprint, and being able to trivially reverse engineer every logged SSL session is likely to be a much more impactful turn of events. I’d venture that there are significant ear-on-the-wire efforts going on right now in anticipation of a reasonable bulk SSL de cloaking solution. Right now we think it doesn’t matter who can see our “secure” traffic. I think that is going to change, retroactively, in a big way.

Re: Willow, Our Quantum Chip

#224

Post by hello_computer »

deanCommie wrote: post #46

I don't want to judge people by their cover, but I want to confess to having those feelings right now. In this day and age, I feel an immediate sense of distrust to any technologist with the "Burning Man" aesthetic for lack of a better word. (which you can see in the author's wikipedia profile from an adjacent festival -> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hartmut_Neven , as well as in this blog itself with his wristbands…

The hall of great scientists is packed with holders of strange beliefs. Half of Newton's writings were on religious speculation, alchemy, and the occult. One of Einstein's very favorite books was Blavatsky's "Isis Unveiled". Just about every key person in early QM was deep into the Vedas. Kary Mullis was an AIDS denialist, and questioned the utility of his own test as a virus detector. If you really think about it, you will see that this phenomenon arises more from necessity than coincidence.

Re: Willow, Our Quantum Chip

#225

Post by arresin »

This is weird. I got this pop up halfway through reading:

> After reading this article, how has your perception of Google changed? Gotten better Gotten worse Stayed the same

Re: Willow, Our Quantum Chip

#226

Post by sekai »

npalli wrote: post #205
vessenes wrote: post #18

I’m a quantum dabbler so I’ll throw out an armchair reaction: this is a significant announcement. My memory is that 256 bit keys in non quantum resistant algos need something like 2500 qubits or so; and by that I mean generally useful programmable qubits. To show a bit over 100 qubits with stability, meaning the information survives a while, long enough to be read, and general enough to run some benchmarks on is some…

> Worth spending a little time doing some long tail strategizing I’d say. Yup, like Bitcoin going to zero.

> Yup, like Bitcoin going to zero.

If the encryption on Bitcoin is broken, say goodbye to the banking system.

Re: Willow, Our Quantum Chip

#227

Post by airstrike »

sdenton4 wrote: post #32
ipsum2 wrote: post #13

They renamed quantum supremacy to "beyond-classical"? That's something.

Quantum supremacy was an absolutely awful name for what it was (ability to do something, anything, better than a classical computer, which remains 'supreme' on all problems of any practical interest).

Sure, but it sounded much cooler

Re: Willow, Our Quantum Chip

#228

Post by vessenes »

npalli wrote: post #205
vessenes wrote: post #18

I’m a quantum dabbler so I’ll throw out an armchair reaction: this is a significant announcement. My memory is that 256 bit keys in non quantum resistant algos need something like 2500 qubits or so; and by that I mean generally useful programmable qubits. To show a bit over 100 qubits with stability, meaning the information survives a while, long enough to be read, and general enough to run some benchmarks on is some…

> Worth spending a little time doing some long tail strategizing I’d say. Yup, like Bitcoin going to zero.

I'm a little more in my wheelhouse here -- without an algo change, Grover's algorithm would privilege quantum miners significantly, but not any more than the industry has seen in the last 13 years (C code on CPU -> GPU -> Large Geometry ASIC -> Small Geometry ASIC are similarly large shifts in economics for miners probably).

As to faking signatures and, e.g. stealing Satoshi's coins or just fucking up the network with fake transactions that verify, there is some concern and there are some attack vectors that work well if you have a large, fast quantum computer and want to ninja in. Essentially you need something that can crack a 256 bit ECDSA key before a block that includes a recently released public key can be inverted. That's definitely out of the reach of anyone right now, much less persistent threat actors, much less hacker hobbyists.

But it won't always be. The current state of the art plan would be to transition to a quantum-resistant UTXO format, and I would imagine, knowing how Bitcoin has managed itself so far, that will be a well-considered, very safe, multi-year process, and it will happen with plenty of time.

Re: Willow, Our Quantum Chip

#229

Post by vessenes »

K0balt wrote: post #223
npalli wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Worth spending a little time doing some long tail strategizing I’d say. Yup, like Bitcoin going to zero.

I think you’re going to need about 10,000,000 qbits to divert a transaction, but that’s still within foreseeable scale. I think it’s extreme likely that the foundation will have finished their quantum resistance planning before we get to 10MM coherent qbits, but still, it’s a potential scenario. More likely that other critical infrastructure failures will happen within trad-finance, much larger vulnerability footprin…

I agree that the scary scenario is stored SSL frames from 20 years of banking. That's nuclear meltdown scenarios.
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