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

Willow, Our Quantum Chip

blog.google

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

451–460 of 557 posts

Re: Willow, Our Quantum Chip

#451

Post by Closi »

l33tman wrote: post #441
crishoj wrote: post #434

Take the announcement with a grain of salt. From German physicist Sabine Hoffenfelder: > The particular calculation in question is to produce a random distribution. The result of this calculation has no practical use. > > They use this particular problem because it has been formally proven (with some technical caveats) that the calculation is difficult to do on a conventional computer (because it uses a lot of entang…

TBH you need to take the youtube influencer Sabine Hoffenfelder with a bigger grain of salt. She has converted to mainly posting clickbait youtube stuff over the last years (unfortunately, she was interesting to listen to earlier). The RCS is a common benchmark with no practical value, as is stated several times in the blog announcement as well. It's used because if a quantum computer can't do that, it can't do any o…

I think simplifying her to 'youtube influencer' is unfair - she is a doctor of theoretical physics with a specialism in quantum gravity who produces science content for youtube. She knows the field enough to comment.

She doesn't even say that this isn't a big leap (she says it's very impressive - just not the sort of leap that means that there are now practical applications for quantum computers, and that a pinch of salt is required on the claim of comparisons to a conventional computer due to the 2019 paper with a similar benchmark).

Re: Willow, Our Quantum Chip

#452

Post by pixelsort »

l33tman wrote: post #441
crishoj wrote: post #434

Take the announcement with a grain of salt. From German physicist Sabine Hoffenfelder: > The particular calculation in question is to produce a random distribution. The result of this calculation has no practical use. > > They use this particular problem because it has been formally proven (with some technical caveats) that the calculation is difficult to do on a conventional computer (because it uses a lot of entang…

TBH you need to take the youtube influencer Sabine Hoffenfelder with a bigger grain of salt. She has converted to mainly posting clickbait youtube stuff over the last years (unfortunately, she was interesting to listen to earlier). The RCS is a common benchmark with no practical value, as is stated several times in the blog announcement as well. It's used because if a quantum computer can't do that, it can't do any o…

As a counterpoint, she recently reviewed a paper in one of her recent videos and completely tore it to shreds as apparently the math was full of absolute nonsense.

This was a fascinating watch, and not the kind of content that is easy to find. Besides videos like that one, I enjoy her videos as fun way to absorb critical takes on interesting science news.

Maybe she is controversial for being active and opinionated on social media, but we need more science influencers and educators like her, who don't just repeat the news without offering us context and interpretation.

Re: Willow, Our Quantum Chip

#453

Post by pas »

prmoustache wrote: post #426
qnleigh wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well. Yes, but currently there are no well tested (ie. recommended by the ITsec community) post-quantum cryptosystems as far as I understand.

https://crypto.stackexchange.com/a/61596

But ... AES is believed to be quantum-safe-ish, so with perfect forwards secrecy this exact threat can be quite well managed.

The currently best known quantum attack on AES requires a serial computation of "half of key length" (Grover's algorithm ... so if they key is 128 bit long then it requires 2^64 sequential steps)

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskNetsec/comments/15i0nzp/aes256_i...

Re: Willow, Our Quantum Chip

#454

Post by eigenket »

perching_aix wrote: post #444
crishoj wrote: post #434

Take the announcement with a grain of salt. From German physicist Sabine Hoffenfelder: > The particular calculation in question is to produce a random distribution. The result of this calculation has no practical use. > > They use this particular problem because it has been formally proven (with some technical caveats) that the calculation is difficult to do on a conventional computer (because it uses a lot of entang…

They explicitly cover all of these caveats in the announcement. Problems that benefit from quantum computing as far as I'm aware have their own formal language class, so it's also not like you have to consider Sabine's or any other person's thoughts and feelings on the subject - it is formally demonstrated that such problems exist. Whether the real world applications arrive or not, you can speculate for yourself. You…

The formal class is called BQP, in analogy with the classical complexity clas BPP. BQP contains BPP but there is no proof that it is stictly bigger (such a proof would imply P != NP). There are problems in BQP we expect are not in BPP but its not clear if there are any useful problems in BQP and not in BPP, other than essentially Shor's algorithm.

On the other hand it's actually not completely necessary to have a superpolynomial quantum advantage in order to have some quantum advantage. A quantum computer running in quadratic time is still (probably) more useful than a classical computer running in O(n^100) time, even though they're both technically polynomial. An example of this is classical algorithms for simulating quantum circuits with bounded error whose runtime is like n^(1/eps) where eps is the error. If you pick eps=0.01 you've got a technically polynomial runtime classical algorithm but it's runtime is gonna be n^100, which is likely very large.

Re: Willow, Our Quantum Chip

#456

Post by weatherlite »

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…

> AI and data security will be unalterably different if so

So what are the implications if so ?

Re: Willow, Our Quantum Chip

#457

Post by whoitwas »

jawns wrote: post #8

> 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?

Well. If you study quantum physics and the folks who found it like Max Planck, they believed in "a conscious and intelligent non-visible living energy force .. . the matrix mind of all matter".

I don't know much about multiverse, but we need something external to explain the magic we uncover.

Energy and quantum mechanics are really cool but dense to get into. Like Planck, I suspect there's a link between consciousness and matter. I also think our energy doesn't cease to exist when our human carcass expires.

Re: Willow, Our Quantum Chip

#458

Post by nworno »

oniony wrote: post #448
booleandilemma wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are okay with a single universe coming to existence out of nothing you should be able to handle parallel universes as well just fine. We have evidence for this universe though.

I believe their point was that, if you accept the reality of _this_ universe being created from nothing, why wouldn't you also accept the notion of _other_ universes similarly existing too. I can get on board with that: that there may be other, distinct universes, but I do not understand how this would lead to the suggestion they would be necessarily linked together with quantum effects.

Disagree with that. The fact that we reasonably accept a well-proven theory (ie the observed universe exists) that has some unexplained parts (we don't currently have a reasonable explanation for where does that universe comes from) doesn't mean that we should therefore accept any unproven theory, especially a unfalsifiable one.

Re: Willow, Our Quantum Chip

#459

Post by zipy124 »

l33tman wrote: post #441
crishoj wrote: post #434

Take the announcement with a grain of salt. From German physicist Sabine Hoffenfelder: > The particular calculation in question is to produce a random distribution. The result of this calculation has no practical use. > > They use this particular problem because it has been formally proven (with some technical caveats) that the calculation is difficult to do on a conventional computer (because it uses a lot of entang…

TBH you need to take the youtube influencer Sabine Hoffenfelder with a bigger grain of salt. She has converted to mainly posting clickbait youtube stuff over the last years (unfortunately, she was interesting to listen to earlier). The RCS is a common benchmark with no practical value, as is stated several times in the blog announcement as well. It's used because if a quantum computer can't do that, it can't do any o…

Just because she is a YouTuber doesn't diminish her other credentials, just as she is incetivised to do clickbait, so are actual scientific communication outlets such as nature, and the more clicky they are the more downloads and citation they will acquire. Incentives change content but don't directly detract from someone's expertise. See: the fact that most universities now publish some lectures on YouTube, it doesn't make the content any less true.

Re: Willow, Our Quantum Chip

#460

Post by whoitwas »

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'm skeptical only because they have AI in the name.
Post reply on HN