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Willow, Our Quantum Chip

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Re: Willow, Our Quantum Chip

#461

Post by chvid »

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…

It would be interesting to see what "standard benchmark computation" was used and what its implementation would like in a traditional computer language.

Does anyone know?

Re: Willow, Our Quantum Chip

#462

Post by dexterdog »

falleng0d wrote: post #449
l33tman wrote: post #441

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 have observed the change in approach to use aggressive (clickbaity) thumbnails, but I do think the quality of the content has not changed. And I can't blame her for adopting this trend, in many cases it is the difference between surviving or not on YouTube nowadays.

How would she not survive on YouTube? Would they block her posts if she didn't use a misleading title and thumbnail (shout-out to dearrow for those who despise this practice)?

Re: Willow, Our Quantum Chip

#463

Post by weakwire »

camillomiller wrote: post #429
oblio wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I read them as sarcastic. Please reply here with your output.

Re: Willow, Our Quantum Chip

#464

Post by vctrnk »

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…

Not to defend Google, but they end up saying much the same:

> The next challenge for the field is to demonstrate a first "useful, beyond-classical" computation on today's quantum chips that is relevant to a real-world application. We’re optimistic that the Willow generation of chips can help us achieve this goal. So far, there have been two separate types of experiments. On the one hand, we’ve run the RCS benchmark, which measures performance against classical computers but has no known real-world applications. On the other hand, we’ve done scientifically interesting simulations of quantum systems, which have led to new scientific discoveries but are still within the reach of classical computers. Our goal is to do both at the same time — to step into the realm of algorithms that are beyond the reach of classical computers and that are useful for real-world, commercially relevant problems.

Re: Willow, Our Quantum Chip

#465

Post by _tk_ »

pas wrote: post #453
prmoustache wrote: post #426

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Google uses NTRU-HRSS internally, which seems reasonable.

https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/identity-security/why...

Re: Willow, Our Quantum Chip

#466

Post by whiplash451 »

Newbie's question: how far is the RCS benchmark from a more practical challenge such as breaking RSA?

The article concludes by saying that the former does not have practical applications. Why are they not using benchmarks that have some?

Re: Willow, Our Quantum Chip

#467

Post by newsbinator »

thrance wrote: post #87
readyplayernull wrote: post #11

> 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, a prediction first made by David Deutsch. Processing in multiverse. Would that mean we are inyecting entropy into those other verses? Could we calculate how many are there from the time it takes to do a given calculation? We need to cool the quantum chip in our universe, ho…

The many-worlds interpretation of quantum theory [1] is widely considered unfalsifiable and therefore mostly pseudoscientific. This article is way in over it's head in claiming such nonsense. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Many-worlds_interpretation

Unfalsifiable does not mean pseudoscientific. Plenty of things might be unfalsifiable for humans (e.g. humans lack the cognitive capacity to conceive of ways to falsify them), but then easily falsifiable for whatever comes after humans.

Re: Willow, Our Quantum Chip

#468

Post by djhn »

prettyStandard wrote: post #442
swores wrote: post #428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> " 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?

Sure it would. If you had Sims that went around killing other Sims, there's no way in hell you would promote them, or use their stimulated experiences as a bases for more complex/serious projects. I'm not deep into LLMs or AI safety right now, but if you have a bad performing AI, you aren't going to use it as a base for future work. I was about to go to bed so I was rushing through my initial comment... I was just tr…

One would have to be rather optimistic and patient if one was to hold out hope for the humanity experiment to not be destined for the Trash bin in this scenario, with our track record.

Re: Willow, Our Quantum Chip

#469

Post by Hilift »

whiplash451 wrote: post #466

Newbie's question: how far is the RCS benchmark from a more practical challenge such as breaking RSA? The article concludes by saying that the former does not have practical applications. Why are they not using benchmarks that have some?

There are already companies selling 5,000+ qubit quantum systems to the NSA. I would assume they are already using it for that in the huge data center in Utah.

Re: Willow, Our Quantum Chip

#470

Post by JKCalhoun »

FredPret wrote: post #378
JKCalhoun wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Something tells me that by the end of the century only the one-time pads will still be holding their secrets.

Even for that to work you need a good random number generator

Honestly not sure how they created one-time pads 100 years ago.
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