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I'm not even sure that a quantum computer has incontrovertibly outperformed a classical one at this time on anything. Some have claimed it, on problems that hav
by MattPalmer1086 3y ago
I'm not even sure that a quantum computer has incontrovertibly outperformed a classical one at this time on anything. Some have claimed it, on problems that have no practical utility. Classical results have also been improved on response.
Arguably then the only concrete achievement of quantum computing to date has been improvements to classical algorithms. However, I fully expect that we will eventually have powerful quantum computers.
Practical applications for those are things like modelling chemical reactions or quantum systems, or optimisation.
No discussion on quantum computing would be complete without a link to Scott Aaronson's blog. Worth a read to get a better understanding of the subject.
https://scottaaronson.com/ https://scottaaronson.com/
- asah 3y agonot promising: "For the 2022-2023 and 2023-2024 academic years, I'm on leave to work at OpenAI on the theoretical foundations of AI safety."
- MattPalmer1086 3y agoYeah true he has been on other things recently.
- Koshkin 3y agoIn the evolutionary sense, the intelligence emerged as, and has always been used as a weapon. Not sure what this can say about its “safety.”
- fao_ 3y agoI don't think it's fair to frame intelligence solely in terms of a weapon when one of the single most important underpinnings of intelligence in terms of predator/prey interactions and group survival is "empathy".
- bee_rider 3y agoIt isn’t clear in the first place what a weapon means in evolutionary terms, I mean it is a competitive process, what isn’t a weapon? Plants tremble at the sheep’s ferocious teeth.
- NooneAtAll3 3y agonot promising as in "blog won't talk about QC anymore" or as in "no trust after being connected to OpenAI/AI safety"?
- sandworm101 3y agoThe big project is decryption. There is a race to be the first country/agency to be able to decrypt data protected by pre-quantum encryption schemes. It is a very narrow use case but there are very deep pockets funding the race.
- kossTKR 3y agoInteresting. What are the motivations behind this funding? What is to gain? As far as i can see there is quite a lot of "quantum safe" encryption so what kind of historical data exists lying around with lots of value?
- gwnywg 3y agoMaybe whoever will break current state of encryption landscape will also gain privilege to build new and benefit from it? In my opinion if breaking AES is to serve military (and hunt for secrets) then it would be done in secret.
- RandomLensman 3y agoAs I understand it, AES isn't particularly susceptible to quantum computing (similar to classical computing).
- Eisenstein 3y agoWhy do you think quantum computing could help break AES?
- rashkov 3y agoSuppose for a moment that you’ve collected twenty years worth of sensitive but encrypted foreign communications. What kind of advantage can you get by having a peak at it?
- fbdab103 3y agoPractically, how much real world value is there going to be? I assume all the big nations spy on each other. Have a very good idea on the broad strokes total number of personnel, planes, ships, bombs, and where they are all located. Potential for novel military insight seems low. There is probably lots of stupid human gossip to be found: mistresses, politically embarrassing failures, self-dealing schemes, etc. Maybe there are a few tantalizing useful nuggets: attached are the full schematics for the planetary weather control machine, where we buried that crashed ufo, location of the archive holding all the kompromat, etc. I have no doubt intelligence agencies would decrypt anything and everything, but it seems more like they would just because vs perceived need.