Comment by gnabgib | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gnabgib | Hacker News Reader

Strange timing given the claim was in 2019, guess this post was generated because of Willow.

Google claims to have proved its supremacy with new quantum computer (256 points, 1 year ago, 229 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36567839

Quantum computers: amazing progress, but probably false supremacy claims (126 points, 5 years ago, 73 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21167368

Google Achieves Quantum Supremacy. Is Encryption Safe? (38 points, 5 years ago, 21 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21100983

Google claims to have reached quantum supremacy (114 points, 5 years ago, 21 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21029598

Google Engineers Think This 72-Qubit Processor Can Achieve Quantum Supremacy (91 points, 7 years ago, 42 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16543876

Google plans to reach a Quantum Computing milestone before the year is out (147 points, 8 years ago, 49 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14171992

> Strange timing given the claim was in 2019

In 2024 Google used 67 quantum bits to solve the same/similar random circuit sampling benchmark, that they used 53 bits in 2019. The discussion from 2019 on what is the relevance (if any) of solving random circuit simulation problems, is equally valid today.

Maybe in 2030 Google or someone will use 200 or 400 bits to solve an even bigger instance of the random circuit simulation benchmark problem, and then we get to have this same discussion once again.

They added a paragraph at the end to address the new experiment.

Still nothing really new here. I'm doubtful anything will convince the author short of shor's algorithm actually factoring large numbers.

https://eprint.iacr.org/2015/1018.pdf

  As pointed out in [57], there has never been a genuine implementation of Shor’s algorithm. The only numbers ever to have been factored by that type of algorithm are 15 and 21, and those factorizations used a simplified version of Shor’s algorithm that requires one to know the factorization in advance.

What’s the point of quoting this?

To me it was eye opening on how skewed is the presentation of these quantum computing number factoring advances.

It is completely in line of the "The Case Against..."

No one is claiming number factoring advances. That would require much longer lived qubits entanglement than is currently possible. The tech is clearly advancing forward though.

That feels like a straw man. Nobody was claiming otherwise.

It feels more like the time to develop the tech has outlived the hype cycle around the tech, perhaps moreso than usual. That doesn't mean it isn't going anywhere, just that it's still slow (and in fact, after the hype cycle, the average press release is more likely to be substantive than during it, even if it's still incremental).

(From my reading/understanding of it, for a while there's been little point in trying to make a quantum computer big enough to do such work, because the individual parts would not work well enough for it to have any chance of success, while this result primarily is showing that they're now at the cusp of the predicted tipping point where the qubits have a low enough error rate that building a larger system out of them has a hope of working. That's the big news in google's recent announcement, not them pushing up the numbers in this somewhat contrived benchmark)

> What’s the point of quoting this?

To remind us of the large difference between the public image vs the reality of quantum computing.

Expectation: From the news, people are getting a feeling that quantum computing revolution is almost behind the corner, and current cryptosystems will soon become irrelevant. People are (here, in Hacker News) asking "is our society ready for this", "what could I do if I had this chip at home", "existing cryptography technology is in danger", "is it time to 100x key length on browsers".

Reality: Using Shor's algorithm to factor 15 = 5×3 is still far beyond the reach of current quantum computers. We can factor 15 = 5×3 and even 21 = 7×3 if we cheat by eliminating those branches from the calculation that are not on the happy path the correct answer.

What are the chances that the CIA has a manhattan project style quantum computer somewhere? I can’t believe that if the current SOTA could break commonly used encryption methods that it would be widely known.

I think it's still unlikely. In the case of the Manhattan project, the USA government wasn't racing against private companies but against other governments. Therefore, all advances in the field where highly secret. In this case, the CIA would be racing against private companies as well, which are hiring the best physicists and engineers too. So, while it's possible that a governmental agency is ahead of what it is publicly know, I doubt that they would be dramatically ahead. This is similar to part of the argument I would present if someone asks me why I believe cryptography in general is secure.

> In this case, the CIA would be racing against private companies as well...

You mean like Skunkworks when they designed the SR-71?

Or DARPA with Atlas?

Or the DoD with the global GPS network?

Or the NSA's ANT catalogue?

Yeah, the government has never had any issues outpacing the private sector. You only ever find out about it when they want you to. Usually that happens 5 to 30 years after the market has already caught up.

All your examples consist of things no company has any commercial incentive to do.

Airlines don't want high altitude supersonic spy planes, for example.

And GPS is a collective action problem: no one wants to pay for it, but we do all benefit from it being ambiently around.

It is basically a certainty that the CIA and NSA have their own projects, and also keep very close tabs on those outside - it is their exact remit.

The great quantum computing nightmare, from the NSA point of view, is someone sidestepping out of nowhere with a viable machine that works in an unexpected and easy to reproduce way.

Edit to add: see also https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNA_computing which while bounded in the same sense as conventional machines would still be a game changer.

For similar reasons, if you do anything interesting in AI, you’re very much the type to be targeted with additional targeted surveillance.

It’s sad to imagine the amount of smart nerds out there whose only actual experience with women is from the fking honeypots that Langley or ft mead et al use to make sure that some prospective AI talent on discord isn’t about to release a bioweapon. Clearly a lot of AI talent overlaps with incels and adjacent communities (see civit.ai as an example of this), It’s common knowledge that field agents skew female since they’re less suspected by patriarchal idiotic targets (they tout this in recruiting for DEI reasons). It’s probably smart for AI startups to tell their male coworkers to be on the lookout for random attractive women trying to talk to you. The US military and foreign service et al specifically warns its members about this and it is a clear and present danger.

And FYI, if the glowies aren’t doing this, they’re not doing their jobs, since the risk of some crazy open source AI person deciding to lone wolf society is rather high, at least according to the less wrong folks (that community I bet is also crawling with spooks). AI is so full of industrial and business espionage that I get scared just being in the space.

I know this is happening too because the private version of it, expert networks, are extraordinarily lucrative and rely on basically laundering of material non public information with plausible deniability. The “experts” on an “expert network” are basically private business spooks, ackin to a private investigator targeting a business.

I saw a lecture from the author of the first DNA computing paper ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonard_Adleman) in '94. We pulled him into a room after the talk (because he was talking about scaling up the computation significantly) and walked him through the calculations. BEcause the system he designed required a great deal of DNA to randomly bind to other DNA in a highly parallel fashion, you'd need enormous vats of liquid being rapidly stirred.

Like other alternate forms of computing, the systems we build on CPUs today are truly hard to beat, partly because people are trained on those systems, partly becaus the high performance libraries are there, and partly because the vendors got good at make stupid codes run stupid fast.

At this point I cannot see any specific QC that could be used repeatedly for productive work (material simulations, protein design) that would be more useful than a collection of entirely conventional computing (IE, a cluster with 20K CPUs, 10K GPUs, 100PB of storage, and a fast interconnect). Every time I see one of these "BMW is using a quantum computer to optimize logistics" and look more closely, it's obvious it's a PR toy problem, not something giving them a business edge.

> What are the chances that the CIA has a manhattan project style quantum computer somewhere?

Possible, but I think zero chance they have anything more practical than Google Willow, which is itself completely impractical for anything except quantum computing research.

The NSA maintains a fleet of oddball devices that give them unique capabilities. Usually these are built by big vendors, but sometimes by smaller companies with a unique feature (IBM Harvest, Connection Machine CM-5, Cray Various Models of *MP) It seems reasonable they have some small number of quantum computers that a limited number of researchers use to explore new ideas, but it's harder to imagine their production operations use QM for cryptologic or other computing.

One of their big needs for production operations is having 24/7 support through christmas break, which favors companies like IBM.

It is just around the corner though! We’re not able to make long lived qubits able to survive multiple gate operations necessary for Shor’s algorithm. But the issue here is error rates and decoherence time, and these decreasing at a geometric rate. We are getting very close to the tipping point enabling practical crypto breaks.

That reminds me of when galvanic batteries were discovered, and it was thought that the corrosion on the electrodes was something that could be worked on and eliminated. If you don't have a prototype that demonstrates all the properties that you're trying to develop, you have not demonstrated the viability of the technology. It could be that it's possible to achieve those properties with a little more work, or that a device that combines all of those properties simultaneously is simply impossible.

People have shown Shor's algorithm for factoring very small numbers, e.g. 15 and 21. That's been shown to work, even if it doesn't feel impressive. There is no reason to expect it won't continue to work as quantum compute advances.

As I understand it, they had to tweak the circuits to remove the codepaths that they knew the input wouldn't hit because otherwise it wouldn't have worked. So... no, Shor's algorithm has not been demonstrated in practice. What's been demonstrated is a similar algorithm that requires you already knowing the factorization of the number you're trying to factor.

A big part of all these discussions is "why should you trust any computational result you can't verify?"

A big problem in science in general is reproducibility. There are thousands of papers being published every month with peer review, which prunes out the most obvious errors, but the whole system is built on trust.

Very few labs around the world are tasked with testing results instead of trying to produce new science, and in this specific case, only google has access to the device being built and the computation tested by them impossible to verify with classic computers, unlike Shor's algorithm which is trivial to test with known primes.

Because you can verify it part of the way there.

The point is to ensure that researchers are actually doing what they think they are doing and not deluding themselves. Its not meant to prevent outright fraud.

Yes, it contains "I) Update (Dec. 10): The Wind in the Willow"

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