Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The “JVG algorithm” only wins on tiny numbers

scottaaronson.blog

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 56 posts

Re: The “JVG algorithm” only wins on tiny numbers

#41

Post by Strilanc »

measurablefunc wrote: post #14
MathMonkeyMan wrote: post #2

The title of this post changed as I was reading it. "It looks like the 'JVG algorithm' only wins on tiny numbers" is a charitable description. The article is Scott Aaronson lambasting the paper and shaming its authors as intellectual hooligans.

Scott Aaronson is the guy who keeps claiming quantum supremacy is here every year so he's like the proverbial pot calling the kettle black.

What do you mean? The original 2019 supremacy experiment was eventually simulated, as better classical methods were found, but the followups are still holding strong (for example [4] and [5]). There was recently a series of blog posts by Dominik Hangleiter summarizing the situation: [1][2][3].

[1]: https://quantumfrontiers.com/2026/01/06/has-quantum-advantag...

[2]: https://quantumfrontiers.com/2026/01/25/has-quantum-advantag...

[3]: https://quantumfrontiers.com/2026/02/28/what-is-next-in-quan...

[4]: https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.04792

[5]: https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.02501

Re: The “JVG algorithm” only wins on tiny numbers

#42

Post by antonvs »

dekhn wrote: post #19
dehrmann wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't get the quantum hype last year. At least with AI, you can see it do some impressive things with caveats, and there are bull and bear cases that are both reasonable. The quantum hype training is promising the world, but compared to AI, it's at the linear regression stage.

It's a variation of nerd snipe. https://xkcd.com/356/ People get taken by the theoretical coolness and ultimate utility of the idea, and assume it's just a matter of clever ideas and engineering to make it a reality. At some point, it becomes mandatory to work on it because the win would be so big it would make them famous and win all sorts of prizes and adulation. QC is far earlier than "linear regression" because l…

> People get taken by the theoretical coolness and ultimate utility of the idea, and assume it's just a matter of clever ideas and engineering to make it a reality. At some point, it becomes mandatory to work on it because the win would be so big it would make them famous and win all sorts of prizes and adulation.

Good description. Commercial fusion power seems to be in the same category currently.

The next step once you have enough thinkers working on the problem is to start pretending that commercial success is merely a few years away, with 5 or 10 years being the ideal number.

Re: The “JVG algorithm” only wins on tiny numbers

#44

Post by mkbosmans »

PLenz wrote: post #15
abound wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same with RSA and other things, I think the author's point is that slapping your name on an algorithm is a pretty big move (since practically, you can only do it a few times max in your life before it would get too confusing), and so it's a gaudy thing to do, especially for something illegitimate.

Leonhard Euler has entered the chat: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_topics_named_after_Leo...

Nothing on that list has been named that way by Euler himself of course.

Re: The “JVG algorithm” only wins on tiny numbers

#45

Post by gsf_emergency_7 »

Strilanc wrote: post #41
measurablefunc wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Scott Aaronson is the guy who keeps claiming quantum supremacy is here every year so he's like the proverbial pot calling the kettle black.

What do you mean? The original 2019 supremacy experiment was eventually simulated, as better classical methods were found, but the followups are still holding strong (for example [4] and [5]). There was recently a series of blog posts by Dominik Hangleiter summarizing the situation: [1][2][3]. [1]: https://quantumfrontiers.com/2026/01/06/has-quantum-advantag... [2]: https://quantumfrontiers.com/2026/01/25/has-quantum…

[dead]

Re: The “JVG algorithm” only wins on tiny numbers

#46

Post by yccs27 »

johncarlosbaez wrote: post #9
guy4261 wrote: post #5

> (yes, the authors named it after themselves) The same way the AVL tree is named after its inventors - Georgy Adelson-Velsky and Evgenii Landis... Nothing peculiar about this imh

Adelson-Velsky and Evgenii Landis were not the ones who named their tree the "AVL tree". In my "crackpot index", item 20 says: 20 points for naming something after yourself. (E.g., talking about the "The Evans Field Equation" when your name happens to be Evans.)

The last line of the introduction

> By doing so, we aim to provide a novel paradigm [...]

also made me think of item 19 on your list:

> 10 points for claiming that your work is on the cutting edge of a "paradigm shift".

I'm sad though that you didn't call it the "Baez crackpot index"...

Re: The “JVG algorithm” only wins on tiny numbers

#47

Post by adgjlsfhk1 »

Strilanc wrote: post #34
scuppernong wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

my understanding is that they factored 15 using a modular exponentiation circuit that presumes that the modulus is 3. factoring 15 with knowledge of 3 is not so impressive. Shor's algorithm has never been run with a full modular exponentiation circuit.

The very first demonstration of factoring 15 with a quantum computer, back in 2001, used a valid modular exponentiation circuit [1]. The trickiest part of the circuit is they compile conditional multiplication by 4 (mod 15) into two controlled swaps. That's a very elegant way to do the multiplication, but most modular multiplication circuits are much more complex. 15 is a huge outlier on the difficulty of actually do…

would other mersenne numbers admit the same trick? if so, factoring 2047 would be really interesting to see. it's still well within the toy range, but it's big enough that it would be a lot easier to believe that the quantum computer was doing something (15 is so small that picking an odd number less than sqrt(15) is guaranteed to be a correct factorization)

Re: The “JVG algorithm” only wins on tiny numbers

#48

Post by bawolff »

Strilanc wrote: post #35
MathMonkeyMan wrote: post #2

The title of this post changed as I was reading it. "It looks like the 'JVG algorithm' only wins on tiny numbers" is a charitable description. The article is Scott Aaronson lambasting the paper and shaming its authors as intellectual hooligans.

Agree. Scott is exactly correct when he just straight calls it crap. It's inaccurate to say it wins on small numbers because on small numbers you would use classical computers. By the time you get to numbers that take more than a minute to factor classically, and start dreaming of quantum computers, you're well beyond the size where you could tractably do the proposed state preparation.

Honestly i think he was remarkably polite given the sort of crap we are talking about.

Re: The “JVG algorithm” only wins on tiny numbers

#49

Post by bawolff »

dehrmann wrote: post #16
kmeisthax wrote: post #4

I mean, considering that no quantum computer has ever actually factored a number, a speedup on tiny numbers is still impressive :P

I didn't get the quantum hype last year. At least with AI, you can see it do some impressive things with caveats, and there are bull and bear cases that are both reasonable. The quantum hype training is promising the world, but compared to AI, it's at the linear regression stage.

Quantum computing is cool, but a lot of the people who were hyping it last year were absolute charletons. They were promosing things that quantum computers couldn't even do theoretically let alone next year. Even the more down to earth claims were stuff we are still 10-40 years away from presented as if its going to happen next month.

Quantum computers are still cool and things worthy of research. Its going to be a very long road though. Where we are with quantum computers is like equivalent to where we were with regular computers in the 1800s.

The hype people just make everything suck and should be ignored.

Re: The “JVG algorithm” only wins on tiny numbers

#50

Post by jerf »

dehrmann wrote: post #16
kmeisthax wrote: post #4

I mean, considering that no quantum computer has ever actually factored a number, a speedup on tiny numbers is still impressive :P

I didn't get the quantum hype last year. At least with AI, you can see it do some impressive things with caveats, and there are bull and bear cases that are both reasonable. The quantum hype training is promising the world, but compared to AI, it's at the linear regression stage.

The only things I'm aware of that I consider actual problems it solves are "it breaks classical encryption" and "you may be able to use it to directly model other quantum systems like for protein folding and such".

Everything else I consider pretty silly. "It can improve logistics" - I'm fairly sure computers are already as good as they can be, what dominates logistics calculations isn't an inability to optimize but the fact the real world can only conform so closely to any model you build. "It can improve finance" - same deal, really. All the other examples I see cited are problem where we've probably already got running code that is at the noise floor imposed by reality and its stubborn unwillingness to completely conform to plans.

If I had $1 to invest between AI and quantum computing I'd end up rounding the fraction of a cent that should rationally go to quantum computing and put the whole dollar in AI.

By far the most exciting possibility is one that Scott Aaronson has cited, which is, what if quantum computers fail somehow? To put it in simple and unsophisticated terms, what if we could prove that you can't entangle more than 1024 qubits and do a certain amount of calculation with them? What if the universe actually refuses to factor a thousand-digit prime number? The way in which it fails would inevitably be incredibly interesting.

Post reply on HN