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Willow, Our Quantum Chip

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Re: Willow, Our Quantum Chip

#541

Post by trogdor »

mrguyorama wrote: post #518
dexterdog wrote: post #462

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)?

>Would they block her posts if she didn't use a misleading title and thumbnail So, the way youtube works is that every single creator is in an adversarial competition for your attention and time. More content is uploaded than can be consumed (profitably, from Youtube's point of view). Every video you watch is a "victory" for that video's creator, and a loss for many others. Every single time youtube shows you a scree…

> they provide ample tooling to creators to A/B test thumbnails

They do? For many years, I made my living from YouTube. This was always a feature that people wanted, but that didn’t exist. It’s been a year-plus since I’ve actively engaged on YouTube as a creator. Is this a recent change?

Re: Willow, Our Quantum Chip

#542

Post by mishra7000 »

movpasd wrote: post #305
wasabi991011 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was also really taken aback by this quote. I have no idea who put it there, but I can assure you the actual paper contains no such nonsense. I would have thought whoever writes the google tech blogs is more competent than bottom tier science journalists. But in this case I think it is more reasonable to assume malice, as the post is authored by the Google Quantum AI Lead, and makes more sense as hype-boosting buzzw…

There are compelling arguments to believe in the many-worlds interpretation. No sign of a Heisenberg cut has been observed so far, even as experiments involving entanglement of larger and larger molecules are performed, which makes objective-collapse theories hard to consider seriously. Bohmian theories are nice, but require awkward adjustments to reconcile them with relativity. But more importantly, they are philoso…

Thank you for this clarification -- for me it addresses a good part of the crank/fringe/sci-fi aspect

> While we're here, we can clear up the misconception about "branching" — there is no branching in many-worlds, just the coherent evolution of the universal wave function. The many worlds are projections out of that wave function.

Re: Willow, Our Quantum Chip

#543

Post by webXL »

tsimionescu wrote: post #411
webXL wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A very interesting philosophical and moral can of worms you just opened there. Bitcoin is governed by the protocol, so if the protocol permits anyone who can sign a valid transaction involving a given UTXO to another address, then it technically isn't a "crime". Morally I'm not sure I'd be able to sleep well at night if I unilaterally took what I didn't exchange value for. As for the forgotten key case, I think the o…

Morally, there is no quandary: it's obviously morally wrong to take someone else's things, and knowing their private key changes nothing. Legally, the situation is the same: legal ownership is not in any way tied to the mechanism of how some system or another keeps track of ownership. Your BTC is yours via a contract, not because the BTC network says so. Of course, proving to a judge that someone else stole your BTC…

Traditional banking is governed by men with guns who depend on votes (for appearances). They always have recourse and motivation to intervene with private transactions. Not so much the case with bitcoin, which is extralegal for the most part and doesn't depend on them.

Re: Willow, Our Quantum Chip

#544

Post by [deleted] »

tsimionescu wrote: post #508
byteknight wrote: post #492

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

[deleted]

Re: Willow, Our Quantum Chip

#545

Post by frogeyedpeas »

m101 wrote: post #499
npalli wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Worth spending a little time doing some long tail strategizing I’d say. Yup, like Bitcoin going to zero.

Bitcoin will just fork to a quantum proof encryption scheme and there will be something called "bitcoin classic" that is the old protocol (which few would care about)

last time they did that people stuck with bitcoin classic instead of the larger block size variant of bitcoin which today is known as bitcoin-cash.

Re: Willow, Our Quantum Chip

#546

Post by kdmtctl »

K0balt wrote: post #364
kdmtctl wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To do what? Replay? Just curious on an attack vector.

Hopefully replay attacks will not be useful, but confidential information will be abundant. There will be actionable information mixed in there , and it will be a lot of data. Just imagine if everything whispered suddenly became shouted.

It could be true. But pearls are rare and storage is expensive.

Re: Willow, Our Quantum Chip

#547

Post by Armanarmenpress »

sesm wrote: post #525
smolder wrote: post #498

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm pretty sure pilot wave is the same kind of unfalsifiable interpretation of the experimental results that MWI is. Also I think people are making too big a deal out of the comment in the article. I took it as kind of tongue-in-cheek. An expert would know MWI is unfalsifiable and inconsequential.

No, Bell Inequality test falsified it.

Bell's inequality refutes the many-worlds interpretation? Where is it written?

Re: Willow, Our Quantum Chip

#548

Post by smolder »

Armanarmenpress wrote: post #547
sesm wrote: post #525

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, Bell Inequality test falsified it.

Bell's inequality refutes the many-worlds interpretation? Where is it written?

I'm sure they meant it refutes pilot-wave theory, though it seems that's not precisely true if you consider a non-local hidden variable to explain instantaneous interaction.

Re: Willow, Our Quantum Chip

#549

Post by qnleigh »

caterpiego wrote: post #539
qnleigh wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nice, thanks for linking that paper. I also did below. The authors argue (e.g. in the first comment here https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=8310#comments ) that by their definition, Google still only has a fraction of one logical qubit. Their logical error rate is of order 1e-3, whereas this paper considers a logical qubit to have error of order 1e-18. Google's breakthrough here is to show that the logical error rate can…

How to understand that logical error rate can reduce exponentially when the system becomes larger? Does it mean each physical qubit will generate more logical qubit when the total number of physical qubits increases?

A simple classical example where this is true is a repetition code. If you represent 1 as 11...1 and 0 as 00...0, randomly flip some bits, and then recover the logical state with majority voting, the probability of a logical error occurring shrinks exponentially as you add more bits to it. This is because a logical error requires flipping at least half the bits, and the probability of that happening decreases exponentially.

The error correcting code used in this work also has a nice intuitive explanation. Imagine a 2D grid of bits, visualized as pixels that can be black or white. Now imagine drawing a bunch of lines of black pixels, and enforcing that lines can only end on the top or bottom boundary (loops are allowed). If there is an even number of lines connecting the top to the bottom, we call that logical 0, and if there is an odd number of lines, we call that logical 1. This again has the property that as you add more bits, the probability of changing between logical 1 and 0 gets exponentially smaller, because the lines connecting top to bottom get longer (just like in the repetiton code).

This code also has the nice property that if you measure the value of a small patch of (qu)bits, there's no way to tell what the logical state is. This is important for quantum error correction, because measurement destroys quantum information. So the fact that local measurements don't reveal the logical state means that the logical state is protected. This isn't true for the repetition code, where measuring a single bit tells you the logical state.

Re: Willow, Our Quantum Chip

#550

Post by ryankshaw »

sizzle wrote: post #255
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…

How long until this can derive a private key from its public key in the cryptocurrency space? Is this an existential threat to crypto?

I had the same question and this article was really helpful in explaining the threat models

https://www.deloitte.com/nl/en/services/risk-advisory/perspe...

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