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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

#261

Post by mrguyorama »

godzillabrennus wrote: post #254
cashsterling wrote: post #252

Until a company can demonstrate a quantum volume of even just 2^16... their computer is just about worthless for any sort of half-real quantum computing. I pay zero attention to any technical information and marketing speak coming from a quantum computing company until they demonstrate decent quantum volume. Most companies computers can't even hit 2^16 so they are figuring out means of distracting the market from the…

Until a company can demonstrate that a motor vehicle can be operated by a layperson, it's just about worthless for any sort of half-real transportation task. I pay zero attention to any technical information and marketing speak coming from a motor vehicle company until they demonstrate decent improvements in operating their machines. Most companies' motor vehicles have to be hand cranked and kick-started by a youthfu…

The Model T was produced in 1908. Normal people being able to use (though not afford) cars was normal before that.

It took only 30 years to go from Otto and Benz going "Look at this neat contraption" to "Mass produced, semi-affordable personal cars".

Re: Willow quantum chip demonstrates verifiable quantum advantage on hardware

#262

Post by xtracto »

andy_ppp wrote: post #178

I would be quite worried about advances in quantum computers if I had any Bitcoin after watching this DEFCON talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OkVYJx1iLNs

I would be more worried about everything else before Crypto... I would be worried about SSH, about blowfish (and all the dumped password databases) and TLS, and oh so many things.

Re: Willow quantum chip demonstrates verifiable quantum advantage on hardware

#263

Post by fwip »

qnleigh wrote: post #233
refulgentis wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I know what you're talking about, but I think you happened to pick a bad example to pick on here. This wind tunnel analogy resembles a common criticism of the prior experiments that were done by Google and others over the last few years. Those experiments ran highly unstructured, arbitrary circuits that don't compute anything useful. They hardly resembled the kind of results that you would expect from a general purpo…

Thanks for the reply and explanation. I admit that I'm not well-versed in quantum computers (trying to understand even basic quantum mechanics seems to elude me), and I deeply appreciate the link for further reading.

Re: Willow quantum chip demonstrates verifiable quantum advantage on hardware

#264

Post by gamblor956 »

godzillabrennus wrote: post #254
cashsterling wrote: post #252

Until a company can demonstrate a quantum volume of even just 2^16... their computer is just about worthless for any sort of half-real quantum computing. I pay zero attention to any technical information and marketing speak coming from a quantum computing company until they demonstrate decent quantum volume. Most companies computers can't even hit 2^16 so they are figuring out means of distracting the market from the…

Until a company can demonstrate that a motor vehicle can be operated by a layperson, it's just about worthless for any sort of half-real transportation task. I pay zero attention to any technical information and marketing speak coming from a motor vehicle company until they demonstrate decent improvements in operating their machines. Most companies' motor vehicles have to be hand cranked and kick-started by a youthfu…

The Ford Model T had been on the market for over almost 2 decades by then. Over 15 million were sold, mostly to laypeople.

In contrast, no quantum computer today actually quantum computes. They just approximate quantum computing in specific scenarios and have yet to match, let alone exceed, the performance of regular computers.

Re: Willow quantum chip demonstrates verifiable quantum advantage on hardware

#265

Post by johncolanduoni »

tczMUFlmoNk wrote: post #255
johncolanduoni wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> not even the core part of Bitcoin blockchains, which are not vulnerable to quantum computers Um, what? Shor’s algorithm can take the public key of a wallet (present on any outgoing transaction in the ledger) and produce its private key. So now you can hijack any wallet that has transferred any Bitcoin. Notably only one successful run of the algorithm is needed per wallet, so you could just pick a big one if it take…

> public key of a wallet (present on any outgoing transaction in the ledger) Genuine question: is this true? I only know a little bit about Bitcoin, but I thought there was a notion of an "extended public key" that's not exposed to the ledger, where each individual public key on the ledger is only used once, or something like that. I'm not at all confident in my understanding, so I'd love if you or someone else knowl…

Extended public keys can be used to generate a family of addresses, but each transaction still needs the public key for any address that has sent money. Someone who uses it religiously can keep most of their money in addresses with no outgoing transactions, meaning their public key is actually secret and therefore cannot be attacked. But there’s so many addresses that have outgoing transactions and huge balances that it wouldn’t make a difference to an attacker - they could skim a fortune and cash out from wallets that are not so well protected.

Re: Willow quantum chip demonstrates verifiable quantum advantage on hardware

#266

Post by rdlw »

zingar wrote: post #227
nine_k wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least they claim that: «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. This repeatable, beyond-classical computation is the basis for scalable verification.» (emph. mine) But apparently they haven't demonstrated the actual portability between two different quantum computers.

What’s the difference between the claim that they’re making and what you say they haven’t done?

Saying something and doing something are different. They claim it is true, but they haven't demonstrated it by doing it.

If a company says they've built the fastest car in the world, a reasonable response is "ok, let's see it drive faster than any other car can", even though they already said that it can do that.

Re: Willow quantum chip demonstrates verifiable quantum advantage on hardware

#267

Post by westurner »

westurner wrote: post #201
wiz21c wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Linux would be a start :-)

FWIU a 6-stage RISC processor is sufficient to run Linux. Things like CUDA-Q may be faster on classical computers than on quantum computers for forever; though what CUDA-Q solves for is also an optimization problem?

> though what CUDA-Q solves for is also an optimization problem?

"Optimization by decoded quantum interferometry" (2025) https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09527-5 .. https://news.ycombinator.com/context?id=45688122

Re: Willow quantum chip demonstrates verifiable quantum advantage on hardware

#268

Post by gblargg »

orblivion wrote: post #83
andrewla wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How could updating the software possibly make a difference here? If the encryption is cracked, then who is to say who owns which Bitcoin? As soon as I try to transfer any coin that I own, I expose my public key, your "Quantum Computer" cracks it, and you offer a competing transaction with a higher fee to send the Bitcoin to your slush fund. No amount of software fixes can update this. In theory once an attack becomes…

Firstly I'd want to see them hash the whole blockchain (not just the last block) with the post-quantum algo to make sure history is intact. But as far as moving balances - it's up to the owners. It would start with anybody holding a balance high enough to make it worth the amount of money it would take to crack a single key. That cracking price will go down, and the value of BTC may go up. People can move over time a…

This would suggest that spreading one's balance among multiple addresses is especially valuable as a deterrent for quantum cracking.

Re: Willow quantum chip demonstrates verifiable quantum advantage on hardware

#269

Post by josefx »

andy_ppp wrote: post #178

I would be quite worried about advances in quantum computers if I had any Bitcoin after watching this DEFCON talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OkVYJx1iLNs

I feel bad about the quantum guru, elder of the quantum village. He starts of his talk by complaining that people assumed "we would have 10 to 20 years" when news about quantum computing hit. The quantum computing hype was 10 years ago. Microsofts attempt to sell people the Quantum computing cloud with Q# is already 8 years old by now. The people who said we had at least 10 years were right. Guy is in denial either about his age or how much of his life he spend trying to sell people on second hand hot air.

Re: Willow quantum chip demonstrates verifiable quantum advantage on hardware

#270

Post by tczMUFlmoNk »

johncolanduoni wrote: post #265
tczMUFlmoNk wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> public key of a wallet (present on any outgoing transaction in the ledger) Genuine question: is this true? I only know a little bit about Bitcoin, but I thought there was a notion of an "extended public key" that's not exposed to the ledger, where each individual public key on the ledger is only used once, or something like that. I'm not at all confident in my understanding, so I'd love if you or someone else knowl…

Extended public keys can be used to generate a family of addresses, but each transaction still needs the public key for any address that has sent money. Someone who uses it religiously can keep most of their money in addresses with no outgoing transactions, meaning their public key is actually secret and therefore cannot be attacked. But there’s so many addresses that have outgoing transactions and huge balances that…

Thanks for explaining!
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