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.
Still nothing really new here. I'm doubtful anything will convince the author short of shor's algorithm actually factoring large numbers.
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.It is completely in line of the "The Case Against..."
(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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
One of their big needs for production operations is having 24/7 support through christmas break, which favors companies like IBM.
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.
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.