What 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
Willow, Our Quantum Chip
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Re: Willow, Our Quantum Chip
#322They opened the API for it and I'm sending requests but the response always comes back 300ms before I send the request, is there a way of handling that with try{} predestined{} blocks? Or do I need to use the Bootstrap Paradox library?
You are getting that response 300ms beforehand because your request is denied.
If you auth with the bearer token "And There Are No Friends At Dusk." then the API will call you and tell you which request you wanted to send.
Re: Willow, Our Quantum Chip
#323Re: Willow, Our Quantum Chip
#324I’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…
You need to distinguish between "physical qubits" and "logical qubits." This paper creates a single "first-of-a-kind" logical qubit with about 100 physical qubits (using Surface Code quantum error correction). A paper from Google in 2019 estimates needing ~20 million physical qubits ("How to factor 2048 bit RSA integers in 8 hours using 20 million noisy qubits" - https://arxiv.org/abs/1905.09749 ), though recent adva…
Thank you for the explanation. It's still an upwards update on the qubit timelines of https://arxiv.org/pdf/2009.05045 (see Fig. 7), but not by an insane amount. We've realized their 95% expectation of qubit progress (1 logical qubit) for 2026, in 2024.92 instead.
Which to be clear is quite a bit faster than expected in 2020, but still within the realm of plausible stuff.
Re: Willow, Our Quantum Chip
#325there is so much skepticism on quantum computing that instead of inflated marketing words one should always start by what the biggest problems are, how they are not still solved yet, and then introduce what the new improvement is. Otherwise there is no knowing if the accomplishment is really significant or not.
Especially if you consider how they choose the words and how they can be interpreted
" Second, Willow performed a standard benchmark computation in under five minutes that would take one of today’s "
Standard benchmark in what sense. Well, it was chosen for task where quantum computer would have better performance.
I am not saying this is nothing. Maybe, use more reserved words, e.g. "special quantum oriented benchmark" or something.
When I think of standard benchmark, I am thinking more common scenarios, e.g. searching, sorting, matrix multiplication.
Re: Willow, Our Quantum Chip
#326Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Worth spending a little time doing some long tail strategizing I’d say. Yup, like Bitcoin going to zero.
eh, they will add a quantum-resistant signature scheme (already a well-understood thing) then people can transfer their funds to the new addresses before it is viable to crack the existing addresses
So the first company that can break bitcoin addresses using quantum computers gets a prize of how many billion(?) dollars by stealing all the non-migrated addresses.
Is that a crime? Lots of forgotten keys in there.
Re: Willow, Our Quantum Chip
#327Earlier quoted context omitted.
What happens when you don't send the request after receiving the response? Please try and report back.
You unlock the "You've met a terrible fate." achievement [1] [1] https://outerwilds.fandom.com/wiki/Achievements
I love myself a good Zelda reference
Re: Willow, Our Quantum Chip
#328I’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 long until this can derive a private key from its public key in the cryptocurrency space? Is this an existential threat to crypto?
Long enough you don't need to panic or worry.
Short enough that its reasonable to start r&d efforts on post quantum crypto.
Re: Willow, Our Quantum Chip
#329I’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…
I think some element of it might be: Shor’s algorithm has been known of for 30 years, and hypothetically could be used to decrypt captured communications, right? So, retroactively I will have been dumb for not having switched to a quantum-resistant scheme. And, dumb in a way that a bunch of academic nerds have been pointing out for decades. That level of embarrassment is frankly difficult to face. And it would be dev…
All you encrypted communication from the 90s (SSL anyways) can probably be decrypted with classical means anyways. 90s SSL was pretty bad.
Re: Willow, Our Quantum Chip
#330Earlier quoted context omitted.
> AI and data security will be unalterably different if so Definitely agree with the latter, but do you have any sources on how quantum comphters make "AI" (i.e. matrix multiplication) faster?
Exploring via Search can become O(1) instead of M^N
That is definitely not true.