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The “World’s Most Powerful Quantum Computer” Is a Hoax with Staged Photos [pdf]

109 points by NickRandom 4y ago

herodotus 4y ago
Are there any real Quantum Computers yet?
- tromp 4y ago
  None that can reliably factor numbers bigger than 21. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integer_factorization_records#Records_for_efforts_by_quantum_computers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integer_factorization_records#...
  - kadoban 4y ago
    That we know of. Machines that can would quickly become important to national security though.
    - api 4y ago
      Not for long: https://csrc.nist.gov/Projects/post-quantum-cryptography https://csrc.nist.gov/Projects/post-quantum-cryptography The cryptographic implications of QC are absurdly exaggerated. QC has no practical impact on symmetric (AES, ChaCha) or hash (SHA2, SHA3, Blake) algorithms. Impact is isolated to number-theoretic asymmetric ciphers of certain types (DH, ECDH, ECDSA, EDDSA, etc.) and even there practical attacks would require very large, fast, low-noise quantum computers. The link I posted above is to a project to create the first NIST-certified asymmetric algorithms believed to not be vulnerable to quantum attack, rendering the whole thing pretty much moot.
      - pseudo0 4y ago
        Yeah, the hype has been extremely excessive. Putting some investment into quantum-resistant public key cryptography now is a reasonable hedge against the possibility of an surprise breakthrough in the next 10-30 years, but that should be about all we need to future-proof things. Unfortunately "quantum" is still a hot buzzword for managers and non-technical leadership, so it will be diverting resources and attention for the foreseeable future.
      - kadoban 4y ago
        > The cryptographic implications of QC are absurdly exaggerated. Every(?) current TLS session is vulnerable. _Many many_ auth sessions of other types are vulnerable. At least petabytes of stored sessions can be decoded (though not all). It's hard to say how it's exaggerated at all. It's pretty much the device from Sneakers, but real. That it won't break every possible thing for all time is true, but it's still about as huge as any practical thing can be.
      - tromp 4y ago
        > QC has no practical impact on symmetric or hash algorithms It would require a doubling of key lengths to maintain security against quantum Grover search attacks. > to create the first NIST-certified asymmetric algorithms believed to not be vulnerable to quantum attack That will likely lead to much more than a doubling of key sizes; perhaps two orders of magnitude bigger. It will severely impact resource constrained cryptographic devices such as credit card chips.
        api 4y ago
        > It would require a doubling of key lengths to maintain security against quantum Grover search attacks. Grover could in theory reduce a 256-bit cipher like AES-256 or ChaCha to a 128-bit cipher. 128 bits is still far beyond what can be brute forced with any sane or practical amount of resources or time. It would mean 128-bit keys would be unsafe, but 256-bit or higher has been recommended for years anyway for reasons beyond QC like birthday attacks. Also keep in mind that this is a theoretical (as in big-O notation) speedup. Real world performance would depend a ton on the speed of the quantum computer. If a QC running Grover's algorithm isn't at least as fast as e.g. a conventional CPU then it might not be much faster in practice than a custom ASIC brute forcing a full strength key. That would make it pretty much an academic demo, not even useful in practice against 128-bit keys.
  - dspillett 4y ago
    How reliably can they factor large numbers? Once false positive and complete failure rates are low enough, using one of them to do most of the legwork with traditional electronics to check the result and rerun as needed becomes a potentially useful combination.
  - upofadown 4y ago
    ... and without having the answer baked in to the implementation...
  - baby 4y ago
    I think even the factorization of 21 was somewhat cheating no? It seems like we’re really a long way off being able to use a QC for anything practical, if ever. And that’s not even talking about cracking crypto.
    - tromp 4y ago
      I agree that a proper demonstration should be of factoring any product of an m-bit prime by an n-bit prime. So if it only worked for 3*7 and not (with the exact same setup) for 3*5 then it shouldn't count. It's sad that no-one has demonstrated a factorization of 4+4 bits (which should include factorizing 55,65,77,91, and 143). That would be an important milestone I think.
      - tengwar2 4y ago
        That's a possible demonstration, but bear in mind that they are also used for more analogue problems such as predicting chemical bond angles, where there is no discrete pass/fail, but rather a measure of how close they got to reality.
        tromp 4y ago
        True; but those other useful applications of quantum computers are much messier to define and qualify, so factoring is still the ideal application for setting a milestone to be achieved.
- simias 4y ago
  Sure(1) 1/ Definition of "real", "quantum" and "computer" may vary. More seriously I don't think there's a real bar to what constitutes a "real" quantum computer, so it's in the eye of the beholder at this point I think. As far as I know from publicly available info, there's nothing resembling a practically usable quantum computer yet (as in, a computer that would outperform a conventional one at some practical task).
- layer8 4y ago
  No practical ones, not by a long stretch. It’s not clear at all if and when there will be ones achieving any measure of quantum supremacy.
- mikewave 4y ago
  There are real, usable, near-realtime Quantum Annealers, which are different from gate model quantum computers, but have proven to be much more amenable to physical implementation. These are more geared towards optimization functions, which can have practical use for logistics, physics simulations, and more. Gate model computers interest everyone because of the potential to factor large numbers; this could potentially render a lot of existing and past cryptography open to decryption that otherwise will be locked up for aeons, especially considering the apparently decaying effect of Moore's Law of late. However, it probably takes millions or billions of gate qubits to do that, whereas thousands of annealing qubits are enough to solve some interesting problems, and to contribute to finding better solutions when combined with classical compute in a hybrid setup.
mc4ndr3 4y ago
someone's boss: no, don't worry about error rates. just deliver something by end of day. URGENT!
hamiltonians 4y ago
the stock is already at $1. a little late
- nkoren 4y ago
  Nope, it's at $5.9, giving them a market cap of $1.175 billion.
  - synu 4y ago
    At least as of the time of this reply, it's $1.38. Last time it was $5.90 was back in February.
    - nkoren 4y ago
      I believe you're looking at the wrong stock? It's $5.93 right now. - https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/IONQ?p=IONQ&.tsrc=fin-srch https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/IONQ?p=IONQ&.tsrc=fin-srch - https://www.google.com/finance/quote/IONQ:NYSE https://www.google.com/finance/quote/IONQ:NYSE
      - nikhila01 4y ago
        They were looking at IONQ+ which is what you get if you google IonQ. I guess those are the warrants. Google has the warrants as IONQ+ but Yahoo as IONQ-WT. - https://www.google.com/finance/quote/IONQ+:NYSE https://www.google.com/finance/quote/IONQ+:NYSE - https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/IONQ-WT https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/IONQ-WT
      - bones-jones 4y ago
        The people mentioning the lower price of $1/$1.38 appear to be referencing $IONQ-WT[1] but I can’t tell what the “WT” is for or whether it has any relation to $IONQ (which is indeed trading at ~$5.9). [1] https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/IONQ-WT/ https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/IONQ-WT/
        4y ago
oncewas 4y ago
It's not surprising, but it is embarrassing. It'll be interesting to see if there are any consequences for this.
madengr 4y ago
As an RF/Microwave engineer, I think the elephant in the room are the control electronics. Presently these are racks of equipment for a few logical qubits. Isn’t there a spareness limit to the qubit arrays to maintain entanglement? How are the read and write electronics going to be reasonably sized, or ever going to achieve the density needed for a million physical qubits?
- tengwar2 4y ago
  Are there any problems for which that number of qubits is needed? The problems in physical chemistry that I have seen seem to require up to about 250 qubits, and cryptography seems somewhat more economical.
  - AlanYx 4y ago
    Any practical problem requiring only 250 qubits is in reference to error-corrected logical qubits. You need about 10,000 qubits to create one error-corrected logical qubit.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
boesboes 4y ago
From what I can tell, and have seen in the past, scorpion capital make a business out of poorly researched, hearsay based, high-school level 'presentations' like this. Always published _after_ taking a huge short position. They might not be wrong, but that would be a happy coincidence imo
- drcongo 4y ago
  I'm slightly fascinated by this document. It's so shoddy and the language used does indeed read like it's written by high school kids, or perhaps the mind behind the time cube. And yet it's 183 pages. Why go to such great lengths to produce a document that it's very hard to take seriously?
  - jacquesm 4y ago
    Because if you throw a lot of shit at a wall something may stick.
    - drcongo 4y ago
      But, couldn't you throw a lot of shit and make it actually look professional?
      - jacquesm 4y ago
        That would require a lot of effort and then it no longer would look like shit which may not help in the plausible deniability department, and to make it look like shit also has the same effect as the spelling errors and weird salutations in those scam emails: it filters for extreme gullibility. You are clearly not the intended audience.
        drcongo 4y ago
        No idea why you got downvoted here, I thought it was an insightful answer.
  - 4y ago
Trouble_007 4y ago
>Timeline of Quantum Computing and Communication< : https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_quantum_computing_and_communication https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_quantum_computin...
wly_cdgr 4y ago
Whipping up histrionic and slanderous decks to tank companies you've shorted seems like a funner-than-most way to scam your way to riches, ngl
deanCommie 4y ago
It won't confuse any reader on HackerNews who understand S3 buckets URL capabilities, but how many less web-savvy investors will be confused by the domain hosting this report, and think the report is published or endorsed by Amazon Web Services? The cynic in me thinks that this was intentional to provide an additional air of credibility (subconscious or otherwise) to the presentation, which is otherwise extremely unprofessional in structure, framing, font selection, emphasis, tone, etc. It reminds me more of TimeCube [0] then professional investigative research/analysis. [0] https://timecube.2enp.com/ https://timecube.2enp.com/

109 points by NickRandom 4y ago

herodotus 4y ago

Are there any real Quantum Computers yet?

tromp 4y ago
None that can reliably factor numbers bigger than 21. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integer_factorization_records#Records_for_efforts_by_quantum_computers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integer_factorization_records#...
- kadoban 4y ago
  That we know of. Machines that can would quickly become important to national security though.
  - api 4y ago
    Not for long: https://csrc.nist.gov/Projects/post-quantum-cryptography https://csrc.nist.gov/Projects/post-quantum-cryptography The cryptographic implications of QC are absurdly exaggerated. QC has no practical impact on symmetric (AES, ChaCha) or hash (SHA2, SHA3, Blake) algorithms. Impact is isolated to number-theoretic asymmetric ciphers of certain types (DH, ECDH, ECDSA, EDDSA, etc.) and even there practical attacks would require very large, fast, low-noise quantum computers. The link I posted above is to a project to create the first NIST-certified asymmetric algorithms believed to not be vulnerable to quantum attack, rendering the whole thing pretty much moot.
    - pseudo0 4y ago
      Yeah, the hype has been extremely excessive. Putting some investment into quantum-resistant public key cryptography now is a reasonable hedge against the possibility of an surprise breakthrough in the next 10-30 years, but that should be about all we need to future-proof things. Unfortunately "quantum" is still a hot buzzword for managers and non-technical leadership, so it will be diverting resources and attention for the foreseeable future.
    - kadoban 4y ago
      > The cryptographic implications of QC are absurdly exaggerated. Every(?) current TLS session is vulnerable. _Many many_ auth sessions of other types are vulnerable. At least petabytes of stored sessions can be decoded (though not all). It's hard to say how it's exaggerated at all. It's pretty much the device from Sneakers, but real. That it won't break every possible thing for all time is true, but it's still about as huge as any practical thing can be.
    - tromp 4y ago
      > QC has no practical impact on symmetric or hash algorithms It would require a doubling of key lengths to maintain security against quantum Grover search attacks. > to create the first NIST-certified asymmetric algorithms believed to not be vulnerable to quantum attack That will likely lead to much more than a doubling of key sizes; perhaps two orders of magnitude bigger. It will severely impact resource constrained cryptographic devices such as credit card chips.
      - api 4y ago
        > It would require a doubling of key lengths to maintain security against quantum Grover search attacks. Grover could in theory reduce a 256-bit cipher like AES-256 or ChaCha to a 128-bit cipher. 128 bits is still far beyond what can be brute forced with any sane or practical amount of resources or time. It would mean 128-bit keys would be unsafe, but 256-bit or higher has been recommended for years anyway for reasons beyond QC like birthday attacks. Also keep in mind that this is a theoretical (as in big-O notation) speedup. Real world performance would depend a ton on the speed of the quantum computer. If a QC running Grover's algorithm isn't at least as fast as e.g. a conventional CPU then it might not be much faster in practice than a custom ASIC brute forcing a full strength key. That would make it pretty much an academic demo, not even useful in practice against 128-bit keys.
- dspillett 4y ago
  How reliably can they factor large numbers? Once false positive and complete failure rates are low enough, using one of them to do most of the legwork with traditional electronics to check the result and rerun as needed becomes a potentially useful combination.
- upofadown 4y ago
  ... and without having the answer baked in to the implementation...
- baby 4y ago
  I think even the factorization of 21 was somewhat cheating no? It seems like we’re really a long way off being able to use a QC for anything practical, if ever. And that’s not even talking about cracking crypto.
  - tromp 4y ago
    I agree that a proper demonstration should be of factoring any product of an m-bit prime by an n-bit prime. So if it only worked for 3*7 and not (with the exact same setup) for 3*5 then it shouldn't count. It's sad that no-one has demonstrated a factorization of 4+4 bits (which should include factorizing 55,65,77,91, and 143). That would be an important milestone I think.
    - tengwar2 4y ago
      That's a possible demonstration, but bear in mind that they are also used for more analogue problems such as predicting chemical bond angles, where there is no discrete pass/fail, but rather a measure of how close they got to reality.
      - tromp 4y ago
        True; but those other useful applications of quantum computers are much messier to define and qualify, so factoring is still the ideal application for setting a milestone to be achieved.
simias 4y ago
Sure(1) 1/ Definition of "real", "quantum" and "computer" may vary. More seriously I don't think there's a real bar to what constitutes a "real" quantum computer, so it's in the eye of the beholder at this point I think. As far as I know from publicly available info, there's nothing resembling a practically usable quantum computer yet (as in, a computer that would outperform a conventional one at some practical task).
layer8 4y ago
No practical ones, not by a long stretch. It’s not clear at all if and when there will be ones achieving any measure of quantum supremacy.
mikewave 4y ago
There are real, usable, near-realtime Quantum Annealers, which are different from gate model quantum computers, but have proven to be much more amenable to physical implementation. These are more geared towards optimization functions, which can have practical use for logistics, physics simulations, and more. Gate model computers interest everyone because of the potential to factor large numbers; this could potentially render a lot of existing and past cryptography open to decryption that otherwise will be locked up for aeons, especially considering the apparently decaying effect of Moore's Law of late. However, it probably takes millions or billions of gate qubits to do that, whereas thousands of annealing qubits are enough to solve some interesting problems, and to contribute to finding better solutions when combined with classical compute in a hybrid setup.

mc4ndr3 4y ago

someone's boss: no, don't worry about error rates. just deliver something by end of day. URGENT!

hamiltonians 4y ago

the stock is already at $1. a little late

nkoren 4y ago
Nope, it's at $5.9, giving them a market cap of $1.175 billion.
- synu 4y ago
  At least as of the time of this reply, it's $1.38. Last time it was $5.90 was back in February.
  - nkoren 4y ago
    I believe you're looking at the wrong stock? It's $5.93 right now. - https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/IONQ?p=IONQ&.tsrc=fin-srch https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/IONQ?p=IONQ&.tsrc=fin-srch - https://www.google.com/finance/quote/IONQ:NYSE https://www.google.com/finance/quote/IONQ:NYSE
    - nikhila01 4y ago
      They were looking at IONQ+ which is what you get if you google IonQ. I guess those are the warrants. Google has the warrants as IONQ+ but Yahoo as IONQ-WT. - https://www.google.com/finance/quote/IONQ+:NYSE https://www.google.com/finance/quote/IONQ+:NYSE - https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/IONQ-WT https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/IONQ-WT
    - bones-jones 4y ago
      The people mentioning the lower price of $1/$1.38 appear to be referencing $IONQ-WT[1] but I can’t tell what the “WT” is for or whether it has any relation to $IONQ (which is indeed trading at ~$5.9). [1] https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/IONQ-WT/ https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/IONQ-WT/
      - 4y ago

oncewas 4y ago

It's not surprising, but it is embarrassing. It'll be interesting to see if there are any consequences for this.

madengr 4y ago

As an RF/Microwave engineer, I think the elephant in the room are the control electronics. Presently these are racks of equipment for a few logical qubits. Isn’t there a spareness limit to the qubit arrays to maintain entanglement? How are the read and write electronics going to be reasonably sized, or ever going to achieve the density needed for a million physical qubits?

tengwar2 4y ago
Are there any problems for which that number of qubits is needed? The problems in physical chemistry that I have seen seem to require up to about 250 qubits, and cryptography seems somewhat more economical.
- AlanYx 4y ago
  Any practical problem requiring only 250 qubits is in reference to error-corrected logical qubits. You need about 10,000 qubits to create one error-corrected logical qubit.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

boesboes 4y ago

From what I can tell, and have seen in the past, scorpion capital make a business out of poorly researched, hearsay based, high-school level 'presentations' like this. Always published _after_ taking a huge short position. They might not be wrong, but that would be a happy coincidence imo

drcongo 4y ago
I'm slightly fascinated by this document. It's so shoddy and the language used does indeed read like it's written by high school kids, or perhaps the mind behind the time cube. And yet it's 183 pages. Why go to such great lengths to produce a document that it's very hard to take seriously?
- jacquesm 4y ago
  Because if you throw a lot of shit at a wall something may stick.
  - drcongo 4y ago
    But, couldn't you throw a lot of shit and make it actually look professional?
    - jacquesm 4y ago
      That would require a lot of effort and then it no longer would look like shit which may not help in the plausible deniability department, and to make it look like shit also has the same effect as the spelling errors and weird salutations in those scam emails: it filters for extreme gullibility. You are clearly not the intended audience.
      - drcongo 4y ago
        No idea why you got downvoted here, I thought it was an insightful answer.
- 4y ago

Trouble_007 4y ago

>Timeline of Quantum Computing and Communication< : https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_quantum_computing_and_communication https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_quantum_computin...

wly_cdgr 4y ago

Whipping up histrionic and slanderous decks to tank companies you've shorted seems like a funner-than-most way to scam your way to riches, ngl

deanCommie 4y ago

It won't confuse any reader on HackerNews who understand S3 buckets URL capabilities, but how many less web-savvy investors will be confused by the domain hosting this report, and think the report is published or endorsed by Amazon Web Services? The cynic in me thinks that this was intentional to provide an additional air of credibility (subconscious or otherwise) to the presentation, which is otherwise extremely unprofessional in structure, framing, font selection, emphasis, tone, etc. It reminds me more of TimeCube [0] then professional investigative research/analysis. [0] https://timecube.2enp.com/ https://timecube.2enp.com/