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Will you heed my warnings now?

scottaaronson.blog

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Re: Will you heed my warnings now?

#61

Post by Revanche1367 »

sanxiyn wrote: post #45
tgv wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> dismissing the Manhattan Project as hopelessly stalled in 1944 Then again, there are enough examples of failed projects. Why should this be comparable to the Manhattan project? In 1944, it was only two years underway, whereas Shor's algorithm is over 30. Tons of articles have been published on quantum computing, while the A bomb was kept as secret as possible, making learning from other countries, sometimes even fr…

The main point is that just as you can't ask for tiny nuclear explosion because nuclear physics just doesn't work that way, you also can't ask for factoring of 21 with Shor's algorithm. Quantum computing just doesn't work that way, sorry.

The analogy between nuclear fission and quantum computing doesn’t really work. Fission was a relatively new physical phenomenon the Manhattan Project scientists were studying to turn it into a weapon of mass destruction on a scale that too had no precedent except in natural disasters. Quantum computing is a new technology that is supposed to make already effectively computable problems computable faster; it is ideally supposed to provide an increase in capacity, not capability. It should definitely be able to make tiny computations work before going for the bigger problems. That’s how all computing works, if it can’t solve simple problems, it’s never going to solve bigger ones. What you’re saying here essentially sounds like “there will be a magical event one day when quantum computing solves the biggest computing problems and we’ll all realize it works.”

I am not particularly invested either which way about the likelihood of quantum computing being a major breakthrough or not but this is seeming like yet one more area of computing research like crypto and LLMs which in recent years is increasingly being flooded by people on a hype train.

Re: Will you heed my warnings now?

#62

Post by boh »

People are starting to catch on to the AI scare mongering, let the quantum computer scare mongering begin. We should probably start giving these companies lots of money lest other countries beat us to it.

Re: Will you heed my warnings now?

#63

Post by missingdays »

watwut wrote: post #24
sharkjacobs wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you saying this because it's an evergreen joke or because you really think there hasn't been meaningful progress in the field since 1996? Duke Nukem Forever was release fifteen years ago. Some things never happen until they suddenly do. The wolf really does eat the boy at the end of The Boy Who Cried Wolf.

The Boy Who Cried Wolf is a story about a boy who have seen a wolf, successfully threatened the wolf away by causing a commotion in a disbelieving village. One day the disbelieving village refused to show up, boy was eaten and thus proven correct. But as it happens in real life politics too, people who were just proven they were wrong continued to blame the boy. The story is told from the point of view of a villagers…

That's one way to completely reframe the story to fit the narrative you want to push

Re: Will you heed my warnings now?

#64

Post by codethief »

YouWhy wrote: post #36

Re the "Manhattan project in 1944" argument - I am very cautious about the "modulo engineering scaling" carve-out -- unlike the uranium manufacturing pipeline of World War 2, that involved massively scaling up a known process, on the face of it there's no uncontroversial process/architecture to scale up in this case. On the face of it, even relatively "point-target" goals of this kind could take many decades if at al…

> I am very cautious about the "modulo engineering scaling" carve-out

As OP said elsewhere[0, 1]:

> Once you understand quantum fault-tolerance, asking “so when are you going to factor 35 with Shor’s algorithm?” becomes sort of like asking the Manhattan Project physicists in 1943, “so when are you going to produce at least a small nuclear explosion?”

In other words (IIUC): Some problems (here: scaling fault tolerance) seem to be easier than others.

[0]: https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=9665#comment-2029013

[1]: See also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47959531 for a very similar quote.

Re: Will you heed my warnings now?

#65

Post by BoppreH »

Many people in this thread are skeptical about quantum computers, and that's fair. This migration is a big part of my current job, and even I think that there's a non negligible chance that we won't see commercially available quantum computers anytime soon.

The problem is that we're not trying to predict the exact future, we're hedging against possible developments. If there's a 50/50 chance of quantum computers being widely deployed for cryptoanalysis, then there's a 50% chance of this migration being useless. But you don't want to bet your security on a coin toss! So, we migrate.

That's the unfortunate truth of security, sometimes the protections are never triggered. But you still need them.

Re: Will you heed my warnings now?

#66

Post by codethief »

toxik wrote: post #23
sanxiyn wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I will let Scott Aaronson speak. (See https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=9668 ) > Sometimes these days, I'll survey the spectacular recent progress in fault-tolerance, 2-qubit gate fidelities, programmable hundred-qubit systems, etc., only to be answered with a sneer: "What's the biggest number that Shor's algorithm has factored? Still 15 after all these years? Haha, apparently the emperor has no clothes!" I've commented…

I talked to a guy who did his doctoral degree on quantum computing and he was not worried at all. In fact he thought it was wildly overhyped, and like cold fusion, self driving cars, or string theory, always just around the corner. Just give us five more years and another grant, please.

N=1 sample size.

I talked to another guy with the same degree in the same field and he was concerned.

Re: Will you heed my warnings now?

#67

Post by i_think_so »

Does djb ever frequent HN? Can we summon him with the correct incantations?

I'd really like to know what his current work on the subject entails, but when I try googling his stuff all I find are years-old papers, more recent meta discussion, and him making a few comments about other peoples' work.

I was sure that by now he'd have at least collaborated on some avant-garde PQ algo that was as different from the NSA approved stuff as chacha20-poly1305 was from AES. I was hoping for a PQ-NaCl folks would be using soon, not the libpqcrypto that seems to lack traction among devs (for reasons I do not understand). I am disappoint.

(It's probably all tucked away in some corner of the web that a layman like me will never find. Sigh.)

Edit: Hah! I gave up on looking for papers or repos and decided to just read his blog instead. Well would'ya look at that! It's non-stop PQ ranting of the kind we've come to love and cherish from DJB. No new repos or code with his imprimatur that I can see so far but better than I was expecting. Looks like I've got some reading to do....

I should have subscribed to his rss feed years ago. And his "microblog" too! https://microblog.cr.yp.to/

Re: Will you heed my warnings now?

#68

Post by i_think_so »

BoppreH wrote: post #65

Many people in this thread are skeptical about quantum computers, and that's fair. This migration is a big part of my current job, and even I think that there's a non negligible chance that we won't see commercially available quantum computers anytime soon. The problem is that we're not trying to predict the exact future, we're hedging against possible developments. If there's a 50/50 chance of quantum computers bein…

Can you talk about what algorithms you're migrating to?

Re: Will you heed my warnings now?

#69

Post by codethief »

brador wrote: post #46

Sounding the alarm while presenting no data or science, as a member of the National academy of sciences, is doing a disservice to the position, to science, to the self. Show the data, the charts, let people decide for themselves.

> Sounding the alarm while presenting no data or science

One needs to read OP's blog post in the context of his other posts from the last couple months (many of which have been discussed here on HN in one way or another), where he does discuss the science.

Re: Will you heed my warnings now?

#70

Post by alfiedotwtf »

alephnerd wrote: post #40
BoppreH wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's true for their CDN ( https://blog.cloudflare.com/post-quantum-for-all/ ), but there's a lot more to do, with a 2029 target ( https://blog.cloudflare.com/post-quantum-roadmap/ ).

Ah yep. Good callout. On a separate note, I've definetly been hearing worried murmurs about "harvest and decrypt" attacks along with post-quantum TEE slightly before the GCP paper, and I definetly think it appears a couple nation states are on track for a "quantum leap" by 2030 given the rate at which I've been hearing it within my network.

How does that work when Diffie Hellman key exchange is ephemeral and so compliant servers couldn’t even roll back sessions if they wanted, to let a MiTM
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