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Willow, Our Quantum Chip

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Re: Willow, Our Quantum Chip

#281

Post by LeftHandPath »

deepburner wrote: post #272
LeftHandPath wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's very useful, I missed that when I read through the article. If the logical qubit can have double the lifetime of any physical qubit, that's massive. Recall IBM's chips, with t-times of ~400microseconds. Doubling that would change the order of magnitude. It still won't be enough to do much in the near term - like other commenters say, this seems to be a proof of concept - but the concept is very promising. The…

I'm sorry if this is nitpicky but your comment is hilarious to me - doubling something is doubling something, "changing the order of magnitude" would entail multiplication by 10.

Hahaha not at all, great catch. Sometimes my gray matter just totally craps out... like thinking of "changing order of magnitude" as "adding 1 extra digit".

Reminds me of the time my research director pulled me aside for defining CPU as "core processing unit" instead of "central processing unit" in a paper!

Re: Willow, Our Quantum Chip

#282

Post by pclmulqdq »

wcoenen wrote: post #238
pclmulqdq wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1024 is for RSA-1024, which is believed to be broken by classical means at this point. Everyone doing anything with RSA is on 4k or larger.

> Everyone doing anything with RSA is on 4k or larger. The Let's Encrypt intermediate certificates R10 and R11 seem to be only 2048 bit.

A signature (not encryption) with short-term valid life is fine at 2048 still.

Re: Willow, Our Quantum Chip

#284

Post by 0_____0 »

dtquad wrote: post #276

Do Americans still want to breakup the big US tech companies like Google? With proper regulation it feels like their positive externalities, like this, is good for humanity.

"Proper regulation" may involve breaking companies into pieces such that they cannot dominate industries and deprive the public the option of choosing a different provider for the services they provide. Does an Alphabet subsidiary working on quantum computer research require 90% of search traffic to go through Google? Or for Android handsets to send a really phenomenal amount of telemetry back to the mothership with no real recourse for the average user?

Re: Willow, Our Quantum Chip

#285

Post by qnleigh »

radioactivist wrote: post #138

Some of these results have been on the arxiv for a few months ( https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.13687 ) -- are there any details on new stuff besides this blog post? I can't find anything on the random circuit sampling in the preprint (or its early access published version).

The peer-reviewed version at Nature has more technical details about the processor itself.

Re: Willow, Our Quantum Chip

#287

Post by unethical_ban »

r33b33 wrote: post #250
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. What do you mean by this?

The only thing I know or understand about quantum computing is its ability to "crack" traditional encryption algorithms.

So the commenter is saying that Cybersecurity needs to be planning for a near-world where traditional cryptography, including lots of existing data at rest, is suddenly as insecure as plaintext.

Re: Willow, Our Quantum Chip

#288

Post by da-bacon »

DebtDeflation wrote: post #34

>the more qubits we use in Willow, the more we reduce errors, and the more quantum the system becomes That's an EXTRAORDINARY claim and one that contradicts the experience of pretty much all other research and development in quantum error correction over the course of the history of quantum computing.

>That's an EXTRAORDINARY claim and one that contradicts the experience of pretty much all other research and development in quantum error correction over the course of the history of quantum computing.

Not sure why you would say that? This sort of exponential suppression of errors is exactly how quantum error correction works and why we think quantum computing is viable. Source: have worked on quantum error correction for a couple of decades. Disclosure: I work on the team that did this experiment. More reading: lecture notes from back in the day explaining this exponential suppression https://courses.cs.washington.edu/courses/cse599d/06wi/lectu...

Re: Willow, Our Quantum Chip

#289

Post by skort »

dtquad wrote: post #276

Do Americans still want to breakup the big US tech companies like Google? With proper regulation it feels like their positive externalities, like this, is good for humanity.

The key words here are "proper regulation". In an era where industries have captured governmental bodies, there will likely be no such regulation, and these tech companies will continue to siphon up resources and funnel them to a handful at the top.

A quote from the article is especially ludicrous: > to benefit society by advancing scientific discovery, developing helpful applications, and tackling some of society's greatest challenges

You don't need a quantum computer to do this. We can solve housing and food scarcity today, arguably our greatest challenges. Big tech has been claiming that it's going to solve all of our problems for decades now and it has yet to put up.

If you want this type of technology to be made and do actual good, we need publicly funded research institutions. Tech won't save us.

Re: Willow, Our Quantum Chip

#290

Post by athesyn »

varjag wrote: post #265
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?

Yes this is deeply unserious tangent in supposedly landmark technology announcement.

It's just marketing.
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