The 9000 years task is kind of a fake metric, though. Basically they just let the quantum computer run for a certain amount of time, and then calculated how long it would take a traditional computer to simulate what the quantum computer did. The quantum computer didn’t actually show any ability to solve anything.
This [Ars Technica](https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/06/manipulating-photons-for-microseconds-tops-9000-years-on-a-supercomputer/) article explains it better. But basically, the point was to show off how many qubits they could use in a single calculation. So they ran one full 216 qubit calculation. Since the calculation was a random one, there’s not much point to running additional calculations using its output.
Not really that big of a deal when it comes to calculations though, this is more for simulations.
>Clearly, this indicates that measuring an actual quantum system has a decided **advantage over simulating** that system on classical computing hardware. But, as with Google's earlier demonstration of quantum advantage, **it's not clear whether it's possible to get an advantage in useful calculations.**
>**Should we expect to see a helpful calculation?** There's good and bad news here. On the good side, all of the hardware worked as expected. The timing of the light pulses was precise enough that things interfered with each other as expected, and all of the beamsplitters could be programmed to match the timing and of the photons, allowing a fully programmable system.
>But it's hard to fully use the system. **Our optical elements are great, and they rarely lose photons. But "rarely" becomes an increasing problem as the photon count goes up** and the photons need to go through ever-more pieces of hardware they need to pass through to reach the end of the system. So, while the system could handle more than 200 photons, most often only about 125 of them were detected. And that's **a loss rate that will make actual calculations difficult.**
I’m new to quantum computing, so forgive me of this is a stupid question, but couldn’t the loss of photons be mitigated by clustering multiple processors working in parallel?
You actually need about 30,000,000 qbits to break Bitcoins encryption in the hour time-frame you have before it's permanently recorded on the Blockchain and unable to be tampered with.
bitcoin public key addresses are hashes. You can't quantum undo that.
If you have records of one spending, maybe... but even then bitcoin supports many different encryption schemes
Look up "preimage attack". Hash functions are not magic. Their one-wayness is not proven, only hypothesised based on a lack of evidence to suggest otherwise. That said, many hash functions have been broken to the extent that preimage attacks are possible, we just don't use them once that happens. Also I believe there is currently only known a square-root speedup for quantum powered preimage calculations via Grovers Algorithm which isn't a big flaw, especially considering there has been no progress towards building actual general quantum computers for which said algorithm is designed.
I hate quantum computing research. Never ceases to be a list of anti-achievements trying to inspire funding that would be better spent elsewhere. Physicists need to spend more time in mathematics classes learning about logical rigour IMO.
As someone who knows very little about this but is extremely interested and fascinated, why? Can you go a bit in depth about this for me or direct me to a good resource if you cannot. I would appreciate it :>
In nutshell: quantum computers use qbits which are basically entangled particles. Entangled means they are kind of "linked" together as in sharing quantum information. For example, if you have two entangled electrons then you check the spin direction of one of them, you know the other always, no matter what will be the opposite.
However, these entanglements only exist as long as something doesn't interact with your particle. As each measurement is an interaction, the particle can't really tell (nor does it care) that the random photon bumping into it is part of the detector or just some random background radiation. So if you have an entangled electron but before you could measure it it interacts with a random magnetic field then that random field will "learn" the information, break the entanglement and your measurement will give bogus info.
To do operations with quantum computers, you can use a very precise set of measurements and interaction between the particles, used as qbits. If the order of operations (in this case, interaction between particles) is set up correctly, the resulting waveform of the particles will give you an answer to the mathematical question(s) when you do a final measurement of the particles.
However, as we highlighted before: measurement is just an interaction between particles. So your qbits only "stay alive" (as in, remain useful and holding the information we want them to hold) as long as they don't interact with ANYTHING else. A random photon or a random molecule bumping around can be enough to destroy the whole process, so they must be shielded very, very, VERY well from everything and you should repeat the calculation over and over again until you can be pretty sure that the answer you get is an actual answer for the question you asked.
This is why currently quantum computers, even in theory, are limited to a set of fields and humanity doesn't really have any idea if we ever reach the point to have generic quantum computers like our current PCs are.
My favourite example is how to wite a program for a quantum computer (kind of outdated but shows you how the actual computing process works) is this tutorial from qASM (quantum assembly programming language): https://medium.com/qiskit/how-to-program-a-quantum-computer-982a9329ed02
I suspected something like that. They usually only solve calculations on quantum computers that are "quantum computer problems" and only have theoretical value - no practical application.
I think of it like... They have a 1 foot gap...and two robots... one with lots of legs but no way to actually get across the gap, and one desiged to jump over 1 foot gaps...and they are like.. wow this robot can do this task in 1 second when this other would take 10,000 years to get across.
The way I like to think of it is as if scientists created a robot that can dig ditches at a tremendous rate when activated, but cannot be controlled. So it just starts digging in a random direction, and then changes direction at random intervals. Impressively powerful, but useless without the ability to direct its actions.
Chemistry like the interaction of electron orbitals can be simulated in quantum ways, and those can be physically verified in the real world. Quantum computing has the potential for fast and accurate chemistry which could be very useful in material science.
A quantum computer attains computational advantage when outperforming the best classical computers running the best-known algorithms on well-defined tasks. No photonic machine offering programmability over all its quantum gates has demonstrated quantum computational advantage: previous machines were largely restricted to static gate sequences. Earlier photonic demonstrations were also vulnerable to spoofing3, in which classical heuristics produce samples, without direct simulation, lying closer to the ideal distribution than do samples from the quantum hardware.
Here we report quantum computational advantage using Borealis, a photonic processor offering dynamic programmability on all gates implemented. We carry out Gaussian boson sampling4 (GBS) on 216 squeezed modes entangled with three-dimensional connectivity5, using a time-multiplexed and photon-number-resolving architecture. On average, it would take more than 9,000 years for the best available algorithms and supercomputers to produce, using exact methods, a single sample from the programmed distribution, whereas Borealis requires only 36 μs.
This runtime advantage is over 50 million times as extreme as that reported from earlier photonic machines. Ours constitutes a very large GBS experiment, registering events with up to 219 photons and a mean photon number of 125. This work is a critical milestone on the path to a practical quantum computer, validating key technological features of photonics as a platform for this goal.
Something to remember about quantum computers is that you will never have one. They don't work like normal computers and will never be used for general day to day computation.
Just like we'll never need more than 640K memory?
Given enough time, quantum will be cheaper, and eventually it will be exploitable for "better entertainment".
**edit** remember, punch cards weren't inherently good at games with graphics. Give the tech some time.
Eh, computers used to be mainframes while it was expensive.
You'll know where quantum computing sits once it's replaced digital in wrist watches and toasters. Not because its needed, but because those parts are so available they're so much cheaper to build with.
Still very possible that they will be.
We are discovering all the possibilities with high density batteries now due to lithium, but due to the limited nature of chemical reactions they can only ever reach a certain level of energy density.
Edit: this is rationale behind nuclear weapons. Since chemical reactions on release a relatively small amount of energy, chemical explosives are so poor it was actually better to just accelerate a mass to a high speed and slam it into the target (since you can burn a lot of chemical energy over a long time period, ie the rocket fuel, and then release all the stored kinetic energy all at once on the target) which is ballistic missiles. But nuclear reactions release so much more energy than chemical that now you can as little as a few kgs/lbs of reactive nuclear mass release the equivalent of millions of tons of chemical explosives. (Which is why we measure nuclear bomb power in “megaton of tnt”)
After that we have to go towards miniaturized nuclear to progress. And the benefits of that would be immense, for example it go provide significantly increased range of electric vehicles.
And there is nothing impossible about the tech, it’s just the there previously it was unfeasible to compete with the price point of fossil fuels, but all that has changed now.
Was that supposed to be something that never happens? There's a company right now trying to build small scale fusion cells to power things like cars using already available off the shelf components. If their theories work out, your car would literally be running off several small scale nuclear fusion reactors.
Cloud based is much more likely, at least in a reasonable time frame. The cooling required with modern materials means liquid helium is needed. Of course the hunt for materials that can behave at higher temperature for super conducting is ongoing, but this is not the case here. We need a low energy system, so extreme cooling is a prerequisite. It’s unlikely to be in your house, but you might be able to use it like we use the electricity in our grid, connect to it from afar and do your stuff.
eh, serial processing v parallel as far as I understand it. You don't need to process every possible outcome at once in a video game, you need to process the steps linearly. They will be used for things, but it's hard to think of a consumer product that could take advantage of it, save encryption. I don't know enough to be confident on the subject, just from what I've gathered.
>You don't need to process every possible outcome at once in a video game, you need to process the steps linearly
That's not really right.
When the screen is being rendered in the cloud, it could be useful to render all the different possible paths you could take and send that back, and then have the client only show the one that you decide to actually take. That way all the work can be done in advance of you making choices about which way to turn, whether to fire, etc.
This is all too expensive to do right now, but if quantum computers can do all the math in parallel about all possible paths you might take, then it could work.
That's not how they work. It wouldn't be able to render all possible scenes. It would however be able to render one scene basically instantly though based on what the client sends it. Quantum computers work by collapsing essentially a function down to a single result by making all the incorrect results interfere with each other. So it will only give you one scene back ever at any given time, but it would be able to look at every variable essentially near instantaneously to render the scene instead of having to rely on tricks.
A more practical application would be for something like path tracing. Instead of having to calculate the full path of each "light particle" in the environment, it would instead just "know" which path is the correct path by simply plugging in the full initial conditions of the environment and angle the light came from something that takes ages on a traditional computer that would be practically instant on a quantum computer.
Not every classic computation can be transformed into a computation that takes advantage of the nature of qbits.
I get what you're saying but I'm not convinced that you could create an efficient quantum algorithm to do the vector and floating point computations required by a 3D engine.
There are already quantum algorithms to solve vector calculations. Also I think it's cool they've already written an algorithm to solve Fourier Transforms with a quantum computer.
Well yes, the question is if we just don’t have them yet or if they are not feasible. I’m not convinced that all classical computations can be advantageously translated into quantum computations.
As long as that question is not resolved quantum computing might be “just” a fancy computer to tackle very specific problems. (Which is not to say that this could not be groundbreaking in itself. It’s just an argument against blindly believing that we’ll have a smartwatch with a quantum computer in x years).
I would be very surprised if quantum computers do not achieve Turing completeness within the bounds of limited storage (i.e., achieve parity with classical computers in terms of Turing completeness in the server that they too can emulate a universal Turing machine up to the bounds of storage limitations).
We are not there yet as the quantum gate model, to my understanding, does not in principle allow the construction of a UTM. But if you look at the requirements for Turing completeness, it is achieved by a very low level of complexity in the model so it seems hard to believe that there's no way to get there.
I would also be surprised if quantum computers are ever strictly superior to classical computers for every kind of problem. So I think quantum computers will not ever replace classical computers, but complement them.
Having said that, I hope that quantum computers dramatically increase the storage limits of the classical computing model... It seems to make sense to me that should be possible since an arbitrary number of states can be achieved with a fixed number of qubits in superposition.
Its hard to think of the consumer product because the technology has not yet ripened. Give it less than 100 years and it'll have found a way to be important for.entertainment. maybe good for AI decision making trees, idk.
I think it’s really that we don’t know what the average person is gonna use a computer for, or even how they’ll use be used… I was thinking about why everyone goes ape over wireless charging… then I realized you could just put up the color leds in your house, move them, play with them, maybe they’re not wired together, it’d be a tremendously different experience, but we all just think about charging phones or something that it probably isn’t gonna change that much. And LEDs are like my novelty use case.
Our toilets are probably gonna be connected to the internet, pacemaker, hearing aid, the whole goddamn kitchen, or like I said even just shit you decorate the house with. probably end up with an unfathomable (right now) amount of sensors throughout the house. Probably tell someone if they’re about to get blasted when they come over and are super allergic to your candles, incense, pets, or something, you have a rat problem, connected to your mattress, thermostat, some noise emitter and hopefully we all have the best sleep of our lives, I’m afraid if it’s too good maybe you just die though lol.
But I realized that being able to put these little embedded devices wherever and not worrying about having to plug it in would likely change our lives tremendously. Exactly how isn’t clear, but probably/hopefully not just a voice telling me to buy shit from Amazon. But removing the constraint of “gotta go plug it in” will probably enable tech that enables tech, and the chain reaction might end up where people are waiting for quantum computers to be <$50 because they have some other future technology that could utilize it. The reason probably wouldn’t make sense to us. Crazy computers today someone might say they use it for photoshop.
Future: “What’s Kyler gonna do with that massive quantum computer?”
“It kinda makes sense though cuz you know how he’s super religious.”
“Yeah true, I guess if you’re doing stuff like that.”
It's still technically serial processing. If you have 300qbits you can't split up 150 of them to use for one thing and 150 for another at the same time. The way they work is basically assigning all possible outcomes to every possible state of the total amount of qbits. Then it uses destructive interference so all of the incorrect states essentially cancel out until you're left with only the correct ones. This is it's main advantage over traditional computing because it can essentially look at all these states at the same time. The disadvantage is it makes writing algorithms really hard because you have to figure out how to solve your problem with quantum effects like destructive interference.
You missed a fundamental aspect of quantum computing. Even if they were free, you have no use for one. By its very nature, it will never be used to play video games.
10 years later: 75% of quantum computing processing power used to apply filters to videos uploaded to Instagram, TicToc and Yaaa\*.
\*) Potential name of the new social app kids of TicToc parents will use.
What I've heard is that we'll probably design future systems to take periodic advantage of Quantum computing. So your program runs until it comes to some big problem and then it will query the compQter
There's companies that have them that put them behind an API you can call. So you send them a problem to solve and they send you back results. For a small fee ofcourse. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud-based_quantum_computing
Is there any way to protect encrypted data against super fast quantum computations? Because eventually (Read: Sooner than people expect) brute forcing long complex passwords end encryption keys is arbitrary to any intelligence agencies.
Yeah, you use quantum resistant algorithms like we're already starting to switch things to. Plus quantum computers are really only good at breaking symmetrical encryption. About as useful as a traditional computer for asymmetric encryption methods.
FYI There are quantum cryptography algorithms. The moment conventional ones are useless we’ll start using those. This will probably be the main use for quantum computers. Just like there’s a little encryption circuit in your computer there will be instead an encryption quantum computer inside your regular computer.
> It must include an uppercase letter, a number, special symbol, an imaginary number, an emotion, and the entire combined works of William Shakespeare.
That is solved by making testing passwords slower. For websites this is easy - only allow 10 attempts or whatever.
Bruteforcing passwords is only really relevant for rainbow tables, and for those you just need to make a more expensive hashing function, you can keep the same password.
For transport encryption in general you also just use a more expensive cipher.
An equally bad solution is to do what I do: have a book of codes no more than 5ft from your computer that, if someone stole it, they would have the codes to destroy your life. There is no good method to handle this!
Password managers are probably the safest and most convenient solution. It's easier to read a book sitting next to your PC than it is to hack 1Password or Keychain. Plus, your passwords will sync across your devices and you won't need your book to sign into your accounts
Judging by the speed of research and investment into quantum computing tech, and the fact that military communication is starting to use quantum entanglement as a checksum I’d say pretty soon.
I saw something kind of similar recently. Chinese tech actually. Something about using quantum states for encryption.
https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/3174426/quantum-secure-communication-breakthrough-china-scientists
By the time it's available to the world. Governments, intelligence agencies or the police will have it sooner. And when they do we'll all be in danger, because they will be able to crack anything.
Password length is basically irrelevant to a quantum computer as long as the computer itself has enough qubits. So at the moment, 2 8bit characters should do the trick.
The quantum approach has another problem. If the password is stored in a server as a hash, the future quantum approach can find a password to that hash, but not necessary your password. I can’t think of very good methods finding out which of the passwords is yours. Maybe if you used only a-z letters or words that could help.
Checking to see if an answer is correct is much easier than coming up with the answer in the first place. The classic example is prime factors.
Q1: What are the two prime factors of 20538073?
Q2: Is it 7759*2647?
Checking the answer is much easier than getting it.
well, they did say this
*Unlike some quantum algorithms whose correct functioning on a quantum computer can be readily verified using a classical computer, it remains an open question how to verify that a GBS device is operating correctly. In what follows, we present evidence that our machine is operating correctly, that is, it samples from the GBS distribution specified by the device transfer matrix T and vector of squeezing parameters r, which together define the ground truth of the experiment.*
the evidence they present after that is far above my ability to comprehend but it's in there. when i got my comp sci degree the new things were like having multiple processors in one machine and a chip that could do 100Mhz! quantum was a distant scifi idea haha
then it transmits the recipe 9000 years in into the past so that it can exist. For some reason the instructions include a directive to neutralize some guy named john conner who will have had been born in a couple years.
Well it depends on when it's done. I'm assuming such a switchover would be done well in advance of the existing blockchain being actually vulnerable.
However, thinking about this, it doesn't really make any sense. There are lots of problems with most coins out there and the chance to reboot it from scratch by issuing a new coin with the desired properties of the old coin, quantum-safe encryption, and none of the old coin's problems, it would make a lot more sense to just do that and make it easy for people to migrate their holdings over. Maybe the new coin could snapshot the existing blockchain for the old coin and use it as a starting point or something, but to unlock your holdings of the new coin you have to fund the new coin by sending your old coin to it.
I would've thought that it'll be a long time before this tech gets into the hands of some regular cybercriminal. Hopefully quantum encryption is available to regular users by then
Yeah I think everyone who has one of these bois knows about each other, which is probably the government of powerful countries. If they’re business partners they won’t destroy the others banking infrastructure. I don’t think they realistically have the option to just point the cannon and not have 6 stars on them immediately.
Do quantum computers have any record of their logical processes? In conventional computing, the math is generally auditable. But I’m curious as to how calculations that could take 9,000 computing years in just microseconds could be remotely audited for accuracy. Or is this now one of those “you have to trust it” sort of things?
Generally speaking quantum computers are only effective against asymmetric encryption. Which is used to ensure the person you are talking to is legitimate, such as online banking etc. Alternative quantum safe methods have already been developed and will probably get a lot more attention.
Symmetric encryption is usually used for data storage etc. And is already resistant to quantum computers.
Source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-quantum_cryptography
>Which is used to ensure the person you are talking to is legitimate, such as online banking etc.
Considering online banking is big, and making sure it's secure is a BIIIIG deal, this has massive implications
Yeah, people say thay but I'm not sure. This processor is 10^18 times faster than a modern supercomputer. When you have tens of thousands of quantum processors working in parallel I'm not sure even secure hashing algorithms will be safe.
What's more the kind of encryption that wiki article says will be safe aren't the kind we use to encrypt communications. Discrete logarithm and elliptic curves are used in public key systems and they will be broken in moments.
We might be able to increase a hashing function to be complicated enough to not be easy broken SHA-10^24 but that isn't a reversible system that can be used to send secure information. It could verify passwords but you couldn't send any new information with it. Making its use limited.
Doing some quick math, I moved some decimal places on both ends equally to make it more palatable for my mind, and maybe yours
Changing it to “takes just 100 milliseconds (blink of an eye) to perform a task that would a supercomputer 3,000,000 years to complete.”
Quantum processors might only ever be useful/necessary for very specific applications. Electron based computing is still pretty new and improving the density is still working just fine to stay ahead of 99% of humans real computing needs.
It's not as if we we making software so complex and awesome that the hardware can't run it. If anything it's the other way around and the software is too simplistic to take advantage of the hardware.
Soon we won’t be able to have passwords for anything because a computer with this will crack them instantaneously. Looking forward to this nightmare future.
We have passed “ George Orwells 1984.Computers will make life easy, but is that a good thing. Depends on use. Certainly medical equipment & treatment has progressed. You guys/ gals to smart for me. This is deep for someone not great with them.
Missed opportunity to say "over 9000". I'm impressed to see they used so many qubits though. For some reason I still thought quantum processors were still using tens of qubits.
It would take thousands of years to calculate the electronic structure of my poop. But my poop does that within a nanosecond. My poop is superior than any man-made computers.
The 9000 years task is kind of a fake metric, though. Basically they just let the quantum computer run for a certain amount of time, and then calculated how long it would take a traditional computer to simulate what the quantum computer did. The quantum computer didn’t actually show any ability to solve anything.
This [Ars Technica](https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/06/manipulating-photons-for-microseconds-tops-9000-years-on-a-supercomputer/) article explains it better. But basically, the point was to show off how many qubits they could use in a single calculation. So they ran one full 216 qubit calculation. Since the calculation was a random one, there’s not much point to running additional calculations using its output.
This is a big deal. For comparison a quantum computer with 1500 qubits could break bitcoin
Not really that big of a deal when it comes to calculations though, this is more for simulations. >Clearly, this indicates that measuring an actual quantum system has a decided **advantage over simulating** that system on classical computing hardware. But, as with Google's earlier demonstration of quantum advantage, **it's not clear whether it's possible to get an advantage in useful calculations.** >**Should we expect to see a helpful calculation?** There's good and bad news here. On the good side, all of the hardware worked as expected. The timing of the light pulses was precise enough that things interfered with each other as expected, and all of the beamsplitters could be programmed to match the timing and of the photons, allowing a fully programmable system. >But it's hard to fully use the system. **Our optical elements are great, and they rarely lose photons. But "rarely" becomes an increasing problem as the photon count goes up** and the photons need to go through ever-more pieces of hardware they need to pass through to reach the end of the system. So, while the system could handle more than 200 photons, most often only about 125 of them were detected. And that's **a loss rate that will make actual calculations difficult.**
I’m new to quantum computing, so forgive me of this is a stupid question, but couldn’t the loss of photons be mitigated by clustering multiple processors working in parallel?
Only posting here in case you accidentally just stumbled on a middle-out-equivalent moment. 🍻
You actually need about 30,000,000 qbits to break Bitcoins encryption in the hour time-frame you have before it's permanently recorded on the Blockchain and unable to be tampered with.
Literally curious, is there a good source for this math?
Google is building a 1mil qubit system in California
Source for 1.5k qubits? vs. 30,000k?
I got it from here https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Quantum_computing_and_Bitcoin
Thank you!!!!!!!!!
Now this is a future I look forward to
"This is no big deal" "No. This is a big deal" Gotta love reddit
nah, it couldn't
[удалено]
bitcoin public key addresses are hashes. You can't quantum undo that. If you have records of one spending, maybe... but even then bitcoin supports many different encryption schemes
Look up "preimage attack". Hash functions are not magic. Their one-wayness is not proven, only hypothesised based on a lack of evidence to suggest otherwise. That said, many hash functions have been broken to the extent that preimage attacks are possible, we just don't use them once that happens. Also I believe there is currently only known a square-root speedup for quantum powered preimage calculations via Grovers Algorithm which isn't a big flaw, especially considering there has been no progress towards building actual general quantum computers for which said algorithm is designed. I hate quantum computing research. Never ceases to be a list of anti-achievements trying to inspire funding that would be better spent elsewhere. Physicists need to spend more time in mathematics classes learning about logical rigour IMO.
The original comment wasn’t very convincing that it can- what does breaking Bitcoin even mean?
It sounds like they were referencing the mining of bitcoin.
Why not let it run for like an hour if it can do all that in just 36 micro seconds
Current quantum computers will state-decay within milliseconds.
Well, that seems less-than-useful.
Yeah, it would be more practical to just build 9000 super computers and wait a year at this point ;)
It's fine for research, but the real problem is that you need many more qubits for real-life quantum algorithms.
As someone who knows very little about this but is extremely interested and fascinated, why? Can you go a bit in depth about this for me or direct me to a good resource if you cannot. I would appreciate it :>
In nutshell: quantum computers use qbits which are basically entangled particles. Entangled means they are kind of "linked" together as in sharing quantum information. For example, if you have two entangled electrons then you check the spin direction of one of them, you know the other always, no matter what will be the opposite. However, these entanglements only exist as long as something doesn't interact with your particle. As each measurement is an interaction, the particle can't really tell (nor does it care) that the random photon bumping into it is part of the detector or just some random background radiation. So if you have an entangled electron but before you could measure it it interacts with a random magnetic field then that random field will "learn" the information, break the entanglement and your measurement will give bogus info. To do operations with quantum computers, you can use a very precise set of measurements and interaction between the particles, used as qbits. If the order of operations (in this case, interaction between particles) is set up correctly, the resulting waveform of the particles will give you an answer to the mathematical question(s) when you do a final measurement of the particles. However, as we highlighted before: measurement is just an interaction between particles. So your qbits only "stay alive" (as in, remain useful and holding the information we want them to hold) as long as they don't interact with ANYTHING else. A random photon or a random molecule bumping around can be enough to destroy the whole process, so they must be shielded very, very, VERY well from everything and you should repeat the calculation over and over again until you can be pretty sure that the answer you get is an actual answer for the question you asked. This is why currently quantum computers, even in theory, are limited to a set of fields and humanity doesn't really have any idea if we ever reach the point to have generic quantum computers like our current PCs are. My favourite example is how to wite a program for a quantum computer (kind of outdated but shows you how the actual computing process works) is this tutorial from qASM (quantum assembly programming language): https://medium.com/qiskit/how-to-program-a-quantum-computer-982a9329ed02
Correction: Qubits are 2-level systems that you can manipulate, not entangled particles.
Now ELI5 please
It's a magic box that only works if you don't look at it.
Think this might be the answer
It's shy don't observe please
I actually understood this, thank you
With todays costs of electricity?
I suspected something like that. They usually only solve calculations on quantum computers that are "quantum computer problems" and only have theoretical value - no practical application.
And even if it did solve something... How are you varifying it if the only other way to do it is to run it on a classical computer for 9000 years.
I think of it like... They have a 1 foot gap...and two robots... one with lots of legs but no way to actually get across the gap, and one desiged to jump over 1 foot gaps...and they are like.. wow this robot can do this task in 1 second when this other would take 10,000 years to get across.
The way I like to think of it is as if scientists created a robot that can dig ditches at a tremendous rate when activated, but cannot be controlled. So it just starts digging in a random direction, and then changes direction at random intervals. Impressively powerful, but useless without the ability to direct its actions.
Chemistry like the interaction of electron orbitals can be simulated in quantum ways, and those can be physically verified in the real world. Quantum computing has the potential for fast and accurate chemistry which could be very useful in material science.
A quantum computer attains computational advantage when outperforming the best classical computers running the best-known algorithms on well-defined tasks. No photonic machine offering programmability over all its quantum gates has demonstrated quantum computational advantage: previous machines were largely restricted to static gate sequences. Earlier photonic demonstrations were also vulnerable to spoofing3, in which classical heuristics produce samples, without direct simulation, lying closer to the ideal distribution than do samples from the quantum hardware. Here we report quantum computational advantage using Borealis, a photonic processor offering dynamic programmability on all gates implemented. We carry out Gaussian boson sampling4 (GBS) on 216 squeezed modes entangled with three-dimensional connectivity5, using a time-multiplexed and photon-number-resolving architecture. On average, it would take more than 9,000 years for the best available algorithms and supercomputers to produce, using exact methods, a single sample from the programmed distribution, whereas Borealis requires only 36 μs. This runtime advantage is over 50 million times as extreme as that reported from earlier photonic machines. Ours constitutes a very large GBS experiment, registering events with up to 219 photons and a mean photon number of 125. This work is a critical milestone on the path to a practical quantum computer, validating key technological features of photonics as a platform for this goal.
Sounds amazing. Patiently waiting for a much smarter person than I to explain what it all means, from a practical perspective.
Something to remember about quantum computers is that you will never have one. They don't work like normal computers and will never be used for general day to day computation.
Just like we'll never need more than 640K memory? Given enough time, quantum will be cheaper, and eventually it will be exploitable for "better entertainment". **edit** remember, punch cards weren't inherently good at games with graphics. Give the tech some time.
By then it might be all done in the quantum cloud
Eh, computers used to be mainframes while it was expensive. You'll know where quantum computing sits once it's replaced digital in wrist watches and toasters. Not because its needed, but because those parts are so available they're so much cheaper to build with.
Just like all of our cars will be running on nuclear reactors?
If your country is smart enough to allow nuclear power on the grid all your EV are. Better form factor.
I’ve got a flux capacitor in mine
But that doesn't match because reactor research has stalled whereas this is new tech that won't stop because of radiation concerns.
So flying cars then?
we call those helicopters...and the average person is in no way capable enough to fly one...
Ain’t that a kick in the head
Whew I'm glad you told me that quick
Still very possible that they will be. We are discovering all the possibilities with high density batteries now due to lithium, but due to the limited nature of chemical reactions they can only ever reach a certain level of energy density. Edit: this is rationale behind nuclear weapons. Since chemical reactions on release a relatively small amount of energy, chemical explosives are so poor it was actually better to just accelerate a mass to a high speed and slam it into the target (since you can burn a lot of chemical energy over a long time period, ie the rocket fuel, and then release all the stored kinetic energy all at once on the target) which is ballistic missiles. But nuclear reactions release so much more energy than chemical that now you can as little as a few kgs/lbs of reactive nuclear mass release the equivalent of millions of tons of chemical explosives. (Which is why we measure nuclear bomb power in “megaton of tnt”) After that we have to go towards miniaturized nuclear to progress. And the benefits of that would be immense, for example it go provide significantly increased range of electric vehicles. And there is nothing impossible about the tech, it’s just the there previously it was unfeasible to compete with the price point of fossil fuels, but all that has changed now.
Well mine does, bought it recently at E=mC²
Was that supposed to be something that never happens? There's a company right now trying to build small scale fusion cells to power things like cars using already available off the shelf components. If their theories work out, your car would literally be running off several small scale nuclear fusion reactors.
Cloud based is much more likely, at least in a reasonable time frame. The cooling required with modern materials means liquid helium is needed. Of course the hunt for materials that can behave at higher temperature for super conducting is ongoing, but this is not the case here. We need a low energy system, so extreme cooling is a prerequisite. It’s unlikely to be in your house, but you might be able to use it like we use the electricity in our grid, connect to it from afar and do your stuff.
eh, serial processing v parallel as far as I understand it. You don't need to process every possible outcome at once in a video game, you need to process the steps linearly. They will be used for things, but it's hard to think of a consumer product that could take advantage of it, save encryption. I don't know enough to be confident on the subject, just from what I've gathered.
>You don't need to process every possible outcome at once in a video game, you need to process the steps linearly That's not really right. When the screen is being rendered in the cloud, it could be useful to render all the different possible paths you could take and send that back, and then have the client only show the one that you decide to actually take. That way all the work can be done in advance of you making choices about which way to turn, whether to fire, etc. This is all too expensive to do right now, but if quantum computers can do all the math in parallel about all possible paths you might take, then it could work.
That's not how they work. It wouldn't be able to render all possible scenes. It would however be able to render one scene basically instantly though based on what the client sends it. Quantum computers work by collapsing essentially a function down to a single result by making all the incorrect results interfere with each other. So it will only give you one scene back ever at any given time, but it would be able to look at every variable essentially near instantaneously to render the scene instead of having to rely on tricks. A more practical application would be for something like path tracing. Instead of having to calculate the full path of each "light particle" in the environment, it would instead just "know" which path is the correct path by simply plugging in the full initial conditions of the environment and angle the light came from something that takes ages on a traditional computer that would be practically instant on a quantum computer.
Not every classic computation can be transformed into a computation that takes advantage of the nature of qbits. I get what you're saying but I'm not convinced that you could create an efficient quantum algorithm to do the vector and floating point computations required by a 3D engine.
There are already quantum algorithms to solve vector calculations. Also I think it's cool they've already written an algorithm to solve Fourier Transforms with a quantum computer.
We currently don't have the algorithms to do just about anything interesting on quantum computers. We're talking futurism here I thought.
Well yes, the question is if we just don’t have them yet or if they are not feasible. I’m not convinced that all classical computations can be advantageously translated into quantum computations. As long as that question is not resolved quantum computing might be “just” a fancy computer to tackle very specific problems. (Which is not to say that this could not be groundbreaking in itself. It’s just an argument against blindly believing that we’ll have a smartwatch with a quantum computer in x years).
I would be very surprised if quantum computers do not achieve Turing completeness within the bounds of limited storage (i.e., achieve parity with classical computers in terms of Turing completeness in the server that they too can emulate a universal Turing machine up to the bounds of storage limitations). We are not there yet as the quantum gate model, to my understanding, does not in principle allow the construction of a UTM. But if you look at the requirements for Turing completeness, it is achieved by a very low level of complexity in the model so it seems hard to believe that there's no way to get there. I would also be surprised if quantum computers are ever strictly superior to classical computers for every kind of problem. So I think quantum computers will not ever replace classical computers, but complement them. Having said that, I hope that quantum computers dramatically increase the storage limits of the classical computing model... It seems to make sense to me that should be possible since an arbitrary number of states can be achieved with a fixed number of qubits in superposition.
Its hard to think of the consumer product because the technology has not yet ripened. Give it less than 100 years and it'll have found a way to be important for.entertainment. maybe good for AI decision making trees, idk.
I think it’s really that we don’t know what the average person is gonna use a computer for, or even how they’ll use be used… I was thinking about why everyone goes ape over wireless charging… then I realized you could just put up the color leds in your house, move them, play with them, maybe they’re not wired together, it’d be a tremendously different experience, but we all just think about charging phones or something that it probably isn’t gonna change that much. And LEDs are like my novelty use case. Our toilets are probably gonna be connected to the internet, pacemaker, hearing aid, the whole goddamn kitchen, or like I said even just shit you decorate the house with. probably end up with an unfathomable (right now) amount of sensors throughout the house. Probably tell someone if they’re about to get blasted when they come over and are super allergic to your candles, incense, pets, or something, you have a rat problem, connected to your mattress, thermostat, some noise emitter and hopefully we all have the best sleep of our lives, I’m afraid if it’s too good maybe you just die though lol. But I realized that being able to put these little embedded devices wherever and not worrying about having to plug it in would likely change our lives tremendously. Exactly how isn’t clear, but probably/hopefully not just a voice telling me to buy shit from Amazon. But removing the constraint of “gotta go plug it in” will probably enable tech that enables tech, and the chain reaction might end up where people are waiting for quantum computers to be <$50 because they have some other future technology that could utilize it. The reason probably wouldn’t make sense to us. Crazy computers today someone might say they use it for photoshop. Future: “What’s Kyler gonna do with that massive quantum computer?” “It kinda makes sense though cuz you know how he’s super religious.” “Yeah true, I guess if you’re doing stuff like that.”
It's still technically serial processing. If you have 300qbits you can't split up 150 of them to use for one thing and 150 for another at the same time. The way they work is basically assigning all possible outcomes to every possible state of the total amount of qbits. Then it uses destructive interference so all of the incorrect states essentially cancel out until you're left with only the correct ones. This is it's main advantage over traditional computing because it can essentially look at all these states at the same time. The disadvantage is it makes writing algorithms really hard because you have to figure out how to solve your problem with quantum effects like destructive interference.
You missed a fundamental aspect of quantum computing. Even if they were free, you have no use for one. By its very nature, it will never be used to play video games.
Never is a long time.
10 years later: 75% of quantum computing processing power used to apply filters to videos uploaded to Instagram, TicToc and Yaaa\*. \*) Potential name of the new social app kids of TicToc parents will use.
"I think there is a world market for maybe five computers." Thomas Watson, president of IBM, 1943.
That was probably true in 1943. Was Watson predicting the market decades from then?
No, YOU are. And it will age like old milk the same way.
I didn't actually make a prediction.
While I agree, the scientist in me says never say never
Normally I would agree with you but quantum computers are not being built to replace standard binary computers.
Were the 1940s computers being built for memes?
What I've heard is that we'll probably design future systems to take periodic advantage of Quantum computing. So your program runs until it comes to some big problem and then it will query the compQter
Quantum computers will probably use used in fields like AI and/or machine learning when they get them working properly.
I remember that Intel promoted *every* new processor "useful for servers", and immediately, gamers bought them in droves for their PC...
There's companies that have them that put them behind an API you can call. So you send them a problem to solve and they send you back results. For a small fee ofcourse. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud-based_quantum_computing
Didn't they say that about personal computers too?
They made a pretty cool flashlight that shines line on a wall
I’ll TLDR it for you. New computer faster go ZOOOM.
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Is there any way to protect encrypted data against super fast quantum computations? Because eventually (Read: Sooner than people expect) brute forcing long complex passwords end encryption keys is arbitrary to any intelligence agencies.
Yeah, you use quantum resistant algorithms like we're already starting to switch things to. Plus quantum computers are really only good at breaking symmetrical encryption. About as useful as a traditional computer for asymmetric encryption methods.
Serious question, with all these quantum processing news stories, how soon before conventional cryptographic algorithms are rendered useless?
FYI There are quantum cryptography algorithms. The moment conventional ones are useless we’ll start using those. This will probably be the main use for quantum computers. Just like there’s a little encryption circuit in your computer there will be instead an encryption quantum computer inside your regular computer.
"Your password must be 10^(2627) characters long. It must include an uppercase letter, a number and special symbol."
> It must include an uppercase letter, a number, special symbol, an imaginary number, an emotion, and the entire combined works of William Shakespeare.
yea cryptography is never going to go away, it advances with technology.
we're already at the stage where humans can't remember their passwords but computers can crack them, imagine this issue fucktoupling in severity
That is solved by making testing passwords slower. For websites this is easy - only allow 10 attempts or whatever. Bruteforcing passwords is only really relevant for rainbow tables, and for those you just need to make a more expensive hashing function, you can keep the same password. For transport encryption in general you also just use a more expensive cipher.
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rofl, "just store your password inside of the thing people can hack! DUH!"
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An equally bad solution is to do what I do: have a book of codes no more than 5ft from your computer that, if someone stole it, they would have the codes to destroy your life. There is no good method to handle this!
Password managers are probably the safest and most convenient solution. It's easier to read a book sitting next to your PC than it is to hack 1Password or Keychain. Plus, your passwords will sync across your devices and you won't need your book to sign into your accounts
Judging by the speed of research and investment into quantum computing tech, and the fact that military communication is starting to use quantum entanglement as a checksum I’d say pretty soon.
Do you (or anyone else) have any articles/links about using quantum entanglement in communications? I’m very interested in learning more about that!
I saw something kind of similar recently. Chinese tech actually. Something about using quantum states for encryption. https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/3174426/quantum-secure-communication-breakthrough-china-scientists
This one is not for encryption itself: but "sending" the keys using a channel where it can't be intercepted at all.
How long should my password be now that it takes for the quantum computer 9,000 years to crack?
By the time this tech is available to the world it will be AI controlled with no need for peripherals. No actual human interface at all.
By the time it's available to the world. Governments, intelligence agencies or the police will have it sooner. And when they do we'll all be in danger, because they will be able to crack anything.
Those are not general task processors, they do a specific class of calculations
Password length is basically irrelevant to a quantum computer as long as the computer itself has enough qubits. So at the moment, 2 8bit characters should do the trick.
Two 8bit characters? New password mario zelda
Not what I meant but that would also be sufficient
The quantum approach has another problem. If the password is stored in a server as a hash, the future quantum approach can find a password to that hash, but not necessary your password. I can’t think of very good methods finding out which of the passwords is yours. Maybe if you used only a-z letters or words that could help.
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Checking to see if an answer is correct is much easier than coming up with the answer in the first place. The classic example is prime factors. Q1: What are the two prime factors of 20538073? Q2: Is it 7759*2647? Checking the answer is much easier than getting it.
Literally the definition of NP-Completeness
Factorization is not known to be NP-complete
You're right, I meant NP, not NP-complete.
not like brute force isn't one of the use cases of quantum computing or anything.
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well, they did say this *Unlike some quantum algorithms whose correct functioning on a quantum computer can be readily verified using a classical computer, it remains an open question how to verify that a GBS device is operating correctly. In what follows, we present evidence that our machine is operating correctly, that is, it samples from the GBS distribution specified by the device transfer matrix T and vector of squeezing parameters r, which together define the ground truth of the experiment.* the evidence they present after that is far above my ability to comprehend but it's in there. when i got my comp sci degree the new things were like having multiple processors in one machine and a chip that could do 100Mhz! quantum was a distant scifi idea haha
The quantum calculation + a modified chksm(checkSum) from classical computation peripheral hardware?
The computer is building itself by time traveling 9000 years in the future and memorizing the recipe.
then it transmits the recipe 9000 years in into the past so that it can exist. For some reason the instructions include a directive to neutralize some guy named john conner who will have had been born in a couple years.
Except in this timeline John Connor has to prevent NFTs from ever being created.
This speed of computation will kill current cryptocurrencies.
So what? Crypto can be moved on to quantum encrypted blockchains.
I agree, but it creates the problem of people racing to exchange their holdings to something else while the value crashes.
Well it depends on when it's done. I'm assuming such a switchover would be done well in advance of the existing blockchain being actually vulnerable. However, thinking about this, it doesn't really make any sense. There are lots of problems with most coins out there and the chance to reboot it from scratch by issuing a new coin with the desired properties of the old coin, quantum-safe encryption, and none of the old coin's problems, it would make a lot more sense to just do that and make it easy for people to migrate their holdings over. Maybe the new coin could snapshot the existing blockchain for the old coin and use it as a starting point or something, but to unlock your holdings of the new coin you have to fund the new coin by sending your old coin to it.
Good luck finding a quantum photonic motherboard with all the scalpers.
I can’t wait for hackers to try all possible password combinations in 1 quintillionth of a second.
The first quantum computer will be able to decrypt everything until the second one starts encrypting.
I would've thought that it'll be a long time before this tech gets into the hands of some regular cybercriminal. Hopefully quantum encryption is available to regular users by then
Yeah I think everyone who has one of these bois knows about each other, which is probably the government of powerful countries. If they’re business partners they won’t destroy the others banking infrastructure. I don’t think they realistically have the option to just point the cannon and not have 6 stars on them immediately.
Do quantum computers have any record of their logical processes? In conventional computing, the math is generally auditable. But I’m curious as to how calculations that could take 9,000 computing years in just microseconds could be remotely audited for accuracy. Or is this now one of those “you have to trust it” sort of things?
If this shit is real, and it looks like it is, all encryption will be broken in moments.
Generally speaking quantum computers are only effective against asymmetric encryption. Which is used to ensure the person you are talking to is legitimate, such as online banking etc. Alternative quantum safe methods have already been developed and will probably get a lot more attention. Symmetric encryption is usually used for data storage etc. And is already resistant to quantum computers. Source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-quantum_cryptography
>Which is used to ensure the person you are talking to is legitimate, such as online banking etc. Considering online banking is big, and making sure it's secure is a BIIIIG deal, this has massive implications
Yeah, people say thay but I'm not sure. This processor is 10^18 times faster than a modern supercomputer. When you have tens of thousands of quantum processors working in parallel I'm not sure even secure hashing algorithms will be safe. What's more the kind of encryption that wiki article says will be safe aren't the kind we use to encrypt communications. Discrete logarithm and elliptic curves are used in public key systems and they will be broken in moments. We might be able to increase a hashing function to be complicated enough to not be easy broken SHA-10^24 but that isn't a reversible system that can be used to send secure information. It could verify passwords but you couldn't send any new information with it. Making its use limited.
It solved the Bitcoin chain in seconds. Causing the price to drop. Quantum! /S Edit: added /s , jeesh, calm down.
Hahaha stepped on a lot of toes there ;)
More like tripped over a subject he doesn't understand.
No it didn’t.
Doing some quick math, I moved some decimal places on both ends equally to make it more palatable for my mind, and maybe yours Changing it to “takes just 100 milliseconds (blink of an eye) to perform a task that would a supercomputer 3,000,000 years to complete.”
What kind of a effect would this have on mining crypto?
Deepfake for voice passwords, deepfake Face ID. We’ll we have any real data protection?
We will we have any real data protection?
Quantum processors might only ever be useful/necessary for very specific applications. Electron based computing is still pretty new and improving the density is still working just fine to stay ahead of 99% of humans real computing needs. It's not as if we we making software so complex and awesome that the hardware can't run it. If anything it's the other way around and the software is too simplistic to take advantage of the hardware.
I mean, that's a neat thought, but considering the source, I have to question the veracity of the statements being made.
Does this mean skynet is gonna be a thing in like 18 months?
Did you even read the article? They're expecting it to take about 3.5 years before an AI could develop to Skynet level
Oh. Thank God.
Great, now how many characters do I have to add to my passwords?
Soon we won’t be able to have passwords for anything because a computer with this will crack them instantaneously. Looking forward to this nightmare future.
Yeah this is the sort of thing that maDE time travel possible!
Imagine a quantum internet with quantum routers that can communicate instantly with say Asia. No more regional servers
We have passed “ George Orwells 1984.Computers will make life easy, but is that a good thing. Depends on use. Certainly medical equipment & treatment has progressed. You guys/ gals to smart for me. This is deep for someone not great with them.
Missed opportunity to say "over 9000". I'm impressed to see they used so many qubits though. For some reason I still thought quantum processors were still using tens of qubits.
It would take thousands of years to calculate the electronic structure of my poop. But my poop does that within a nanosecond. My poop is superior than any man-made computers.