[dead]
Willow, Our Quantum Chip
311–320 of 557 posts
Re: Willow, Our Quantum Chip
#312[flagged]
Re: Willow, Our Quantum Chip
#313[dead]
Here is a free preview (lecture 6): https://youtu.be/6rf-hjyNl4U
Re: Willow, Our Quantum Chip
#314This is a great technical achievement. It gives me some hope to see that the various companies are able to invest into what is still very basic science, even if it were mostly as vanity projects for advertising purposes.
Quantum computing will surely have amazing applications that we cannot even conceive of right now. The earliest and maybe most useful applications might be in material science and medicine.
I'm somewhat disappointed that most discussions here focus on cryptography or even cryptocurrencies. People will just switch to post-quantum algorithms and most likely still have decades left to do so. Almost all data we have isn't important enough that intercept-now-decrypt-later really matters, and if you think you have such data, switch now...
Breaking cryptography is the most boring and useless application (among actual applications) of quantum computing. It's purely adversarial, merely an inconsequential step in a pointless arms race that we'd love to stop, if only we could learn to trust each other. To focus on this really betrays a lack of imagination.
Re: Willow, Our Quantum Chip
#315Earlier quoted context omitted.
Uh, no? Not for large N. There are about 2^152 possible legal chess states. You cannot build a classical computer large enough to compute that many states. Cryptography is generally considered secure when it involves a search space of only 2^100 states. But you could build a computer to search though sqrt(2^152) = 2^76 states. I mean it'd be big--that's on the order of total global storage capacity. But not "bigger t…
Doing 2^76 iterations is huge . That's a trillion operations a second for two and a half thousand years if I've not slipped up and missed a power of ten.
Google's SHA-1 collision took 2^63.1 hash operations to find. Given that a single hash operation takes more than 1000 cycles, that's only less than three doublings away.
Cryptographers worry about big numbers. 2^80 is not considered secure.
Re: Willow, Our Quantum Chip
#316Earlier quoted context omitted.
He’s quoting the number of logical qubits (which is 1024 IIRC, not 2500), after error correction. ETA: Wikipedia 2330 qubits, but I'm not sure it is citing the most recent work: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elliptic-curve_cryptography#ci...
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.
2048. There is no plausible conventional attack on 2048; whatever breaks 2048 is probably going to break 4096, as I understand it.
https://crypto.stackexchange.com/questions/1978/how-big-an-r...
Re: Willow, Our Quantum Chip
#317Earlier quoted context omitted.
I took this conversation to be about ECC, not RSA.
My completely unfounded tin foil hat at the moment is that ECC was pushed as a standard not because it was faster/ smaller, but the smaller bit size makes it less quantum resistant and is more prone to be broken first (if not already) via quantum supremacy.
You're right, that's pretty unfounded.
Re: Willow, Our Quantum Chip
#318I’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…
How can I, a regular software engineer, learn about quantum computing without having to learn quantum theory? > Worth spending a little time doing some long tail strategizing I’d say any tips for starters?
I always recommend Watrous's lecture notes: https://cs.uwaterloo.ca/~watrous/QC-notes/QC-notes.pdf
I prefer his explanation to most other explanations because he starts, right away, with an analogy to ordinary probabilities. It's easy to understand how linear algebra is related to probability (a random combination of two outcomes is described by linearly combining them), so the fact that we represent random states by vectors is not surprising at all. His explanation of the Dirac bra-ket notation is also extremely well executed. My only quibble is that he doesn't introduce density matrices (which in my mind are the correct way to understand quantum states) until halfway through the notes.
Re: Willow, Our Quantum Chip
#319What benchmark is being referred here?
>>Willow performed a standard benchmark computation in under five minutes that would take one of today’s fastest supercomputers 10 septillion (that is, 1025) years — a number that vastly exceeds the age of the Universe
Re: Willow, Our Quantum Chip
#320> 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?
So are we now concerned with the environment of another universe? Like climate activitist but for multiverses?