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Willow, Our Quantum Chip

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Re: Willow, Our Quantum Chip

#421

Post by janpmz »

GilKalai wrote: post #403

In the past five years I participated in a project (with Yosi Rinott and Tomer Shoham) to carefully examine the Google's 2019 "supremacy" claim. A short introduction to our work is described here: https://gilkalai.wordpress.com/2024/12/09/the-case-against-g... . We found in that experiment statistically unreasonable predictions (predictions that were "too good to be true") indicating methodological flaws. We also fou…

I've heared claims before that quantum computers are not real. But I didn't understand it. Can anybody explain the reasoning behind the criticism? Are they just simulated?

Re: Willow, Our Quantum Chip

#423

Post by anonymoushn »

marcosdumay wrote: post #351
notarealllama wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

ECC is easier to implement right. Even the older ones that are full of footguns have orders of magnitude less footguns than RSA. So don't fear them due to unfounded theories.

Is there consensus on what signature validation is correct? https://hdevalence.ca/blog/2020-10-04-its-25519am

Re: Willow, Our Quantum Chip

#424

Post by minitech »

kortilla wrote: post #419
ramchip wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Forward secrecy is designed to prevent the compromise of a long-term secret key from affecting the confidentiality of past conversations. However, forward secrecy cannot defend against a successful cryptanalysis of the underlying ciphers being used, since a cryptanalysis consists of finding a way to decrypt an encrypted message without the key, and forward secrecy only protects keys, not the ciphers themselves.[8]…

I’m talking specifically about RSA being eventually broken. If just RSA is broken and you were using ECDHE for symmetric keying, then you’re fine. The point is that you can build stuff on top of RSA today even if you expect it to be broken eventually if RSA is only for identity verification.

The relevant RSA break is sufficiently powerful quantum computers, which also break ECDH (actually, ECDH is easier than classically equivalent-strength RSA for quantum computers[1]), so no, you’re not fine.

[1] https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/33069/why-is-ec...

Re: Willow, Our Quantum Chip

#426

Post by prmoustache »

qnleigh wrote: post #249
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…

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…

> so there's a case to be made for switching to quantum-resistant cryptography (like lattice-based cryptography) sooner rather than later.

This.

People seems to think that because something is end to end encrypted it is secure. They don't seem to grasp that the traffic and communication that is possibly dumped/recorded now in encrypted form could be used against them decades later.

Re: Willow, Our Quantum Chip

#427

Post by swores »

a2128 wrote: post #415
codeyperson wrote: post #345

If we are in a simulation. This seems like a good path to getting our process terminated for consuming too much compute.

I doubt we would even register as a blip. The universe is absolutely massive and there's celestial events that are unthinkably massive and complex. Black hole mergers, supernovae, galaxies merging. Hell, think of what chaos happens in the inside of our own sun, and multiply that by 100 billion stars in a galaxy, and multiply that by 100 billion galaxies. Humanity is ultimately inconsequential.

Surely it would depend on what the simulation actually was?

If you imagine simulations we can build ourselves, such as video games, it's not hard to add something at the edge of the map that users are prevented from reaching and have the code send "this thing is massive and powerful" data to the players. Who's to say that the simulation isn't actually focussed on earth, and everything including the sun is actually just a fiction designed to fool us?

Re: Willow, Our Quantum Chip

#428

Post by swores »

prettyStandard wrote: post #371
codeyperson wrote: post #345

If we are in a simulation. This seems like a good path to getting our process terminated for consuming too much compute.

AI too. I've followed Many worlds & Simulation theory a bit too far and I ended up back where I started. I feel like the most likely scenario is we are in a AI (kinder)garden being grown for future purposes. So God is real, heaven is real, and your intentions matter. Obviously I have no proof...

> "and your intentions matter."

How do you reach that conclusion?

Characters in The Sims games technically have us human players as gods, it doesn't mean that when we uninstall the game those characters get to come into our earthly (to them) heaven or have any consequences for actions performed during the simulation?

Re: Willow, Our Quantum Chip

#429

Post by camillomiller »

oblio wrote: post #337
handfuloflight wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you tried using the Schrödinger Exception Handler? It catches errors both before and after they occur simultaneously, until you observe the stack trace.

I swear I can't tell which of these comments are sarcastic/parody and which are actual answers. A sort of quantum commenting conundrum, I guess.

They are both, just until the moment you try to read them

Re: Willow, Our Quantum Chip

#430

Post by crote »

becquerel wrote: post #254
crote wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it really fair to call that "computation"? I am definitely not an expert, but it seems they are just doing a meaningless operation which happens to be trivial on a quantum computer but near-impossible to simulate on a classical computer. To me that sounds a bit like saying my "sand computer" (hourglass) is way faster than a classical computer, because it'd take a classical computer trillions of years to exactly si…

As they say explicitly in the article, this is like criticizing the first rocket to reach the edge of space for not getting anywhere useful.

It seems like they went from lighting a candle to firing off some fireworks. Impressive, but there's still a long way to go until they can land a human on the moon - let alone travel to Alpha Centauri like some people are claiming.
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