9 ms·
Cargo Cult Quantum Factoring
- escape_goat 4y agoI have no comment of actual value to contribute but I note that by the standards of the field we can infer the existence of the Schxorr algorithm.
- cs702 4y agoHe's referring to this: https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.12372 https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.12372 Scott's take: > NO. JUST NO.
- melling 4y agoThere are over 20 names on that paper. That is unusual?
- computerphage 4y agoI don't know why you're downvoted. I think it's not unusual given the field. Certainly some fields have much larger average number of authors than others
- 77pt77 4y agoThis is not experimental particle physics, where CERN just publishes everyone in CMS or ATLAS. Apparently the most recent ones just mention the * Collaboration, but I distinctively remember seeing papers with hundreds of names in the author list.
- moffkalast 4y agoIn academia? No. Everyone and their mom will add their name to any paper they can to get references.
- stephc_int13 4y agoYeah, and this is a as bad as it sounds. A pyramidal scheme, nothing less.
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 4y ago> All told, this is one of the most actively misleading quantum computing papers I’ve seen in 25 years, and I’ve seen … many.
- svat 4y agoContrast with HN discussion of the purported breakthrough: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34235350 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34235350
- cwillu 4y ago[flagged]
- detrites 4y ago[flagged]
- JumpCrisscross 4y agoI’m not seeing the contrast. Aaronson speaks more definitively. But the top comments on HN [1][2] were well-reasoned scepticism. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34237886 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34237886 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34237218 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34237218
- barathr 4y agoAnd Schneier's own post expressed skepticism while noting that this is something that should be check-able now.
- svat 4y agoWhile it's indeed true that the top two threads' root comments are sceptical, replies to them, and further threads, present counter-arguments — one could easily come away from reading the HN discussion thinking that there's something to this paper. (And indeed, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34261645 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34261645)
- furyofantares 4y agoEarlier comment thread on Schneier's post about it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34235350 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34235350 I find this an interesting case because most of us probably can't rely on very much of our own reasoning to evaluate, and rely on beliefs about Schneier or Aaronson or other posters here. At least I noticed I was less skeptical than I otherwise would be due to the earlier post coming from Schneier, despite some very critical comments of the paper here, and then also noticed this slight hesitation to be skeptical went away completely with Scott's post.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- A4ET8a8uTh0 4y ago<< If I’m slow to answer comments, it’ll be because I’m dealing with two screaming kids. This is about the only downside ( and simultaneous benefit ) of staying at home. I am genuinely glad he weighed in. I do not have enough background knowledge to evaluate the initial claims.
- ramdac 4y agoTl;dr? = there's no breakthrough.
- yalue 4y agoOne of the most fun (?) parts of academia is the unique blend of frustration and satisfaction that results when a shoddy paper somehow clears peer review only to get eviscerated when it lands on the desk of an actual expert. "the detailed exploration of irrelevancies" LOL, if that isn't a "time-tested" method for making a paper sound academic, I don't know what is.
- hannob 4y agoIt hasn't cleared peer review, it's a preprint (which is pretty common in cryptography, peer review usually happens when results are already old news).
- cscurmudgeon 4y ago> the detailed exploration of irrelevancies Also signals a bad reviewer who wanted their work cited. Not in this case though.
- ramraj07 4y agoThis is not always the case. SA and Sabine, are the hyper rare outliers in this regard. Fields like biology have no such folks for variety of reasons (I’m counting out some celebrities involved in pointing out actual misconduct instead of sloppy work).
- lofatdairy 4y agoWho even are the big science communicators in for current research in bio? Nobody comes to mind, not even a non-professor.
- dekhn 4y agoEric Topol
- faitswulff 4y agoAkiko Iwasaki aka @virusesimmunity on Twitter is also a good follow for, well, viruses and immunity. Ed Yong for excellent long form journalism.
- Tomte 4y agoReal title: Cargo Cult Quantum Factoring
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- jwilk 4y agoThe submission title was "Scott Aaronson weighs in on purported quantum factoring breakthrough", but it's been fixed.
- dQw4w9WgXcQ 4y agoEventually Scott Aaronson will be wrong. Call it a reverse black swan, but we will all remember it as the day the quantum computing era began.
- krastanov 4y agoScott Aaronson is not a quantum-computing skeptic, quite the opposite, he has always seemed optimistic about its prospects and his work has been fundamental to progress in the field. He just does not like hyped-up work that has little substance. If anything, Bruce Schneier should have been a bit more skeptical - this type hyped-up unreviewed preprint papers appear very frequently these days.
- barathr 4y agoI think he was fairly skeptical but said the proof would come when someone tries to implement it; he now links to Aaronson's take in his original blog post.
- inasio 4y agoJust wanted to point out that Scott Aaronson is not one of those anti quantum curmudgeons. Besides bashing on companies with questionable claims, I think he's been pretty open minded about looking for problems and algorithms with actual quantum advantages.
- nyrikki 4y agoAs someone who lived though one AI winter and seriously fears another, I view fighting hype is important to allowing useful research to happen. 'Super position' and 'entanglement' have been overly mystified in QM in general and the implications of probabilistic Turing machines vs the typical non-deterministic Turning machine examples is important. While probabilistic Turing machines are non-deterministic, they don't work the way that most examples offer. Same problem with elementary descriptions of entropy so it isn't just the quantum fields problem.
- 4y ago
- adamsmith143 4y agoI did graduate work in Materials Science and the understanding in our lab was to be very skeptical of papers from China, particularly from the State Key Labs as they were very often impossible to replicate and ended up being useless. Seems relevant to this paper as well.
- qwezxcrty 4y ago[flagged]
- colechristensen 4y agoA country, and specific institutions within, having a bad reputation for published research reliability isn’t racism.
- dekhn 4y agoCan you explain, in detail, why you believe that making a statement about the scientific output of a country, as measured by paper quality, is necessarily racist? In particular, I'm going to challenge you on this because the "racism" argument has been used as an easy cop-out to denigrate an opinion all-too-commonly. Please just explain your thinking of why it's "racist". Assume your reader is aware of the effects of socioeconomic status, national ambitions to become a science powerhouse, and the incentives to publish groundbreaking work.
- TchoBeer 4y agoThere are tons, literally hundreds of Chinese-Americans and Chinese-Europeans and Chinese immigrants living all over the world who do research, and their work is not at all suspect. The reason why Chinese papers are suspect has to do with the academic and financial incentives which exist in the modern day People's Republic of China. With that being said, it's definitely possible that Chinese papers are perceived as suspect for racist reasons as well.
- NotYourLawyer 4y agoChina the country, not Chinese the race. They’re not the same, and it’s not racism to throw shade at a country that deserves shade.
- 0xf00ff00f 4y agoIn the original paper they claim to have factored a 48-bit number with an implementation of their algorithm. Did they use some kind of trick?
- fsh 4y agoThe actual work is done by a classical computer. Factoring a 48-bit number is not exactly difficult.
- chowells 4y agoWhy would they need to have done so? The blog post argues there's no evidence this is any faster than classical Schnorr's algorithm, and classical Schnorr's algorithm can easily factor a 48-bit number. And as the post also makes very sure to point out, Schnorr != Shor.
- Bootvis 4y agoShnorr != Schnorr
- ablatt89 4y agoIt looks like the paper specifically claims to create an optimized quantum algorithm for SR pair finding which is most time consuming part the Schnorr fatoring algorithm. It starts with a classical computational lattice problem, defines the optimization problem in a specific form (3), and then maps it to a Hamiltonian to represent a lattice matrix and a PauliZ matrix ((1, 0), (0, -1)) (4) and if we have a Hamiltonian, we can create a QC. The proof of the reduced memory complexity is linked in section 31 but it is really long winded however, it seems the classical Schnorr lattice reduction problem for factoring integers has a space complexity of O((logN)^(α)/α*loglogN)) which according to the author, since the paper can map SR pair finding (the time consuming piece of Schnorr's algorithm) to a Hamiltonian, we then have a quantum factoring algorithm of the same complexity. Seems pretty handwavy to me.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- vouaobrasil 4y agoAs a former researcher in the sciences, I get the feeling that "cargo cult" research is not all that uncommon, especially when a idea gets embedded in the popular stream of thought. There is a whole cluster of cargo cult publishing when it comes to evolutionary theory because of the misunderstanding of natural selection. In mathematics there is Godel's incompleteness theorems, and in computer science we have quantum computing. With regard to quantum computing, I find it as irritating as the author of the blog. And I honestly think the internet is to blame, because it has increased the reward for being notorious, at least in the sense that there is more attention bestowed upon you for making spurious claims. And I believe the internet is also to blame for people desiring such attention, because the technology of the internet has displaced genuine, social interaction with superficial fluff that bears little resemblance to what humans actually need to feel socially fulfilled.
- gweinberg 4y agoAccording to the Sopranos, a Schnor is someone who comes around to eat Carmela's cooking.
- greyw 4y agoSchnorrer not Schnor.