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Willow, Our Quantum Chip

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Re: Willow, Our Quantum Chip

#501

Post by jmcqk6 »

nobrains wrote: post #169
codeulike wrote: post #60

They 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?

What happens when you don't send the request after receiving the response? Please try and report back.

No matter what we've tried so far, the request ends up being sent.

The first time I was just watching, determined not to press the button, but when I received the response, I was startled into pressing it.

The second time, I just stepped back from my keyboard, and my cat came flying out of the back room and walked on the keyboard, triggering the request.

The third time, I was holding my cat, and a train rumbled by outside, rattling my desk and apparently triggering the switch to send the request.

The fourth time, I checked the tracks, was holding my cat, and stepped back from my keyboard. Next thing I heard was a POP from my ceiling, and the request was triggered. There was a small hole burned through my keyboard when I examined it. Best I can figure, what was left of a meteorite managed to hit at exactly the right time.

I'm not going to try for a fifth time.

Re: Willow, Our Quantum Chip

#502

Post by vlovich123 »

swores wrote: post #427
a2128 wrote: post #415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ju…

The common trait that all hypothetical high-fidelity simulated universes possess is the ability to produce high-fidelity simulated universes. And since our current world does not possess this ability, it would mean that either humans are in the real universe, and therefore simulated universes have not yet been created, or that humans are the last in a very long chain of simulated universes, an observation that makes the simulation hypothesis seem less probable.

Re: Willow, Our Quantum Chip

#503

Post by nick3443 »

codeulike wrote: post #60

They 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?

Help! Every time I receive the response, an equal number of bits elsewhere in memory are reported as corrupt by my ECC RAM.

Re: Willow, Our Quantum Chip

#504

Post by EGreg »

Any chance people will actually start reversing SHA1 hashes in the next few years? Is there any quantum algorithm for reversing one-way functions like that? (I mention SHA1 because they can find collissions.)

Re: Willow, Our Quantum Chip

#505

Post by [deleted] »

AlexCoventry wrote: post #393
thrance wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The error rates given are still horrendous and nowhere near low enough for the Quantum Fourier Transform used by Shor's algorithm. Taking qubit connectivity into account, a single CX between 2 qubits that are 10 edges aways gives an error rate of 1.5%. Also, the more qubits you have/the more instructions are in your program, the faster the quantum state collapses. Exponentially so. Qubit connectivity is still ridicul…

In addition to that, the absolutely enormous domains that the Fourier Transform sums over (essentially, one term in the sum for each possible answer), and the cancellations which would have to occur for that sum to be informative, means that a theoretically-capable Quantum Computer will be testing the predictions of Quantum Mechanics to a degree of precision hundreds of orders of magnitude greater than any physics ex…

[deleted]

Re: Willow, Our Quantum Chip

#506

Post by Vecr »

adgjlsfhk1 wrote: post #494
bwesterb wrote: post #490

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you don't mind a one terabyte public key. https://eprint.iacr.org/2017/351.pdf

also that paper (IMO) is ridiculously conservative. Just using 1GB keys is plenty sufficient since it would require a quantum computer with a billion bits to decrypt.

How long does it take to generate a key that big? What probabilities do you need to put on generating a composite number and not a prime? Does the prime need extra properties?

Re: Willow, Our Quantum Chip

#507

Post by yalogin »

Trying to understand how compute happens in Quantum computers. Is there a basic explanation of how superposition leads to computing?

From chatgpt, "with n qubits a QC can be in a superposition of 2^n different states. This means that QCs can potentially perform computations on an exponential number of inputs at once"

I don't get how the first sentence in that quote leads to the second one. Any pointers to read to understand this?

Re: Willow, Our Quantum Chip

#508

Post by tsimionescu »

byteknight wrote: post #492
tsimionescu wrote: post #413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the key point that makes the quoted statement sciencey gibberish is that the Many Worlds Interpretation is just that - an interpretation. There is no way to prove or disprove it (except if you proved that the world is not actually quantum mechanical, in which case MWI might not be a valid interpretation of the new theory). Saying "this is more evidence for MWI" is thus true of any quantum mechanical experimen…

I would argue because we can't postulate a means of testing it now does not mean it is thereby impossible to prove; merely currently.

This would be true if we were talking about something like String Theory, or Loop Quantum Gravity.

But it is not true for MWI: MWI was designed from the ground up as an interpretation of the mathematics and experimental results of quantum mechanics. It is designed specifically to not match all of the predictions of quantum mechanics, and to not make any new predictions. Other interpretations are also designed in the same way.

So, if the people creating these interpretations succeeded in their goals when making them, then they will never be experimentally verifiable.

Re: Willow, Our Quantum Chip

#509

Post by l33tman »

pixelsort wrote: post #452
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…

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…

I think I know which you mean, but TBH that paper read as an AI auto-generated troll paper that any physics undergrad should be able to dissect :) It was a bit fun to watch though and sure sometimes you need to provide some fun content as well!

Re: Willow, Our Quantum Chip

#510

Post by wasabi991011 »

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?

Very far.

I'm not sure how to put it quantitatively, but my impression from listening to experts give technical presentations is that the breaking-rsa-type algorithms are a decade or two away.

This is very soon from a security perspective, as all you need is to store current data and break it in the future. But it is not soon enough to use for benchmarking current systems.

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