Live data from Hacker News

Willow quantum chip demonstrates verifiable quantum advantage on hardware

blog.google

31–40 of 281 posts

Re: Willow quantum chip demonstrates verifiable quantum advantage on hardware

#31
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why wait? Just go read the paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09526-6 In the last sentence of the abstract you will find: "These results ... indicate a viable path to practical quantum advantage." And in the conclusions: "Although the random circuits used in the dynamic learning demonstration remain a toy model for Hamiltonians that are of practical relevance, the scheme is readily applicable to real p…

SO... BTC goes to zero?

No, we're still not much closer to that event.

Re: Willow quantum chip demonstrates verifiable quantum advantage on hardware

#32

“13,000× faster” sounds huge, but I wonder what it’s being compared to. Quantum speedups are always tricky to measure

The article states: “...13,000 times faster on Willow than the best classical algorithm on one of the world’s fastest supercomputers...”

I agree it's not very precise without knowing which of the world's fastest supercomputers they're talking about, but there was no need to leave out this tidbit.

Re: Willow quantum chip demonstrates verifiable quantum advantage on hardware

#33
"surpassing even the fastest classical supercomputers (13,000x faster)"

"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."

"The results on our quantum computer matched those of traditional NMR, and revealed information not usually available from NMR, which is a crucial validation of our approach."

It certainly seems like this time, there finally is a real advantage?

Re: Willow quantum chip demonstrates verifiable quantum advantage on hardware

#37

the big problem with quantum advantage is that quantum computing is inherently error-prone and stochastic, but then they compare to classical methods that are exact let a classical computer use an error prone stochastic method and it still blows the doors off of qc this is a false comparison

They get the same result when they run it a second time and it matches the classical result; this is their key achievement (in addition to the speed).

Re: Willow quantum chip demonstrates verifiable quantum advantage on hardware

#38
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why wait? Just go read the paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09526-6 In the last sentence of the abstract you will find: "These results ... indicate a viable path to practical quantum advantage." And in the conclusions: "Although the random circuits used in the dynamic learning demonstration remain a toy model for Hamiltonians that are of practical relevance, the scheme is readily applicable to real p…

SO... BTC goes to zero?

If quantum computers crack digital crytography, traditional bank account goes to zero too because regular 'ol databases also use crytography techniques for communication.

Re: Willow quantum chip demonstrates verifiable quantum advantage on hardware

#39
post #12

Can someone explain if this is still the RCS problem or a similar one? My impression was that every problem a quantum computer solves in practice right now is basically reducible from 'simulate a quantum computer'

This is not the RCS problem or indeed anything from number theory.

The announcement is about an algorithm which they are calling Quantum Echoes, where you set up the experiment, perturb one of the qbits and observe the “echoes” through the rest of the system.

They use it to replicate a classical experiment in chemistry done using nuclear magnetic resonance imaging. They say they are able to reproduce the results of that conventional experiment and gather additional data which is unavailable via conventional means.

Re: Willow quantum chip demonstrates verifiable quantum advantage on hardware

#40
post #17

We're all asking it: any impact on AES?

The rule of thumb is that a working quantum computer that can run Grover's algorithm reduces the security of a symmetric cipher to half of its key size. That is, AES-128 should be considered to have a 64 bit key size, which is why it's not considered "quantum-safe."

Edit: An effective key space of 2^64 is not secure according to modern-day standards. It was secure at the times of DES.

Post reply on HN