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The problem it solved would take a septillion years to do on a conventional computer but no one other than a quantum researcher cares about that problem. How a

The problem it solved would take a septillion years to do on a conventional computer but no one other than a quantum researcher cares about that problem. How about solving a problem someone that’s not a quantum researcher would care about. Give me traveling salesmen with n=10. Or factor a 10 digit number. Something. Until then quantum computers are in the same category as commercial fusion. Long on “breakthroughs”, zero on results. Look at cancer researchers for a nice contrast. The annual number of “breakthrough that could cure cancer!1!” announcements have dropped to near zero while steady, real progress is being made all the time.

asdasdsddd 2y ago
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kccqzy 2y ago
Google says the next step is to find a problem with real life application. From https://blog.google/technology/research/google-willow-quantum-chip/ https://blog.google/technology/research/google-willow-quantu... > The next challenge for the field is to demonstrate a first "useful, beyond-classical" computation on today's quantum chips that is relevant to a real-world application.
- simpaticoder 2y ago
  I always assumed the obvious application was for Google to make a QaaS (Quantum as a Service) for factoring large primes. One obvious big customer would be intellegence agencies, especially the NSA.
  - thehappypm 2y ago
    Can you imagine? Send us a number, we send you the factors. And a bill. With lots of zeroes
  - ilya_m 2y ago
    The only problem with this business model is that once you factored one number, you kill your market - people will stop using pre-quantum crypto. (The obvious retort is that NSA would have harvested a ton of RSA/EC-encrypted traffic by then and would keep cracking ciphers going back decades. Unfortunately, old secrets is a rapidly depreciating asset class.)
    - fooker 2y ago
      That's why it won't be a public market.
    - r0m4n0 2y ago
      Partially true. If you copy a ton of encrypted data today, you can maybe decrypt it tomorrow
    - red_admiral 2y ago
      If you can get a quantum computer to take discrete logarithms on secp256k1 or mess with SHA256, then you can either get $$$ very quickly or you nuke almost the entire crypto market. For the former, you'd have to keep your discovery secret but just be unusually good at minting new coins. Getting crypto coins to move over to post-quantum seems to me to be a much harder problem than e.g. rushing out a new version of TLS or SSH. The key to Satoshi's original coins is a rapidly _apprecicating_ secret at the moment, but paradoxically also one that might immediately crater out if someone actually discovers a generic way to break the crypto involved. I'm not an expert on this angle of things but: as far as I know, Shor's quantum algorithm breaks both RSA (factoring) and DSA (finite-field discrete logarithms). But I'm not sure if it works the same way against elliptic curves - or at least you'd probably need a bigger computer to attack the same level of security. It's not clear to me if a quantum computer could effectively attack SHA256, either: Shor definitely does not help, Grover cuts the search space from 256 to 128 bits but that's still not practical to iterate over.
      - kevvok 2y ago
        > But I'm not sure if it works the same way against elliptic curves - or at least you'd probably need a bigger computer to attack the same level of security. Elliptic curve cryptography is also based on the difficulty of computing discrete logarithms, which makes it vulnerable to Shor’s algorithm. Unfortunately, while the increased difficulty of brute forcing ECC with a classical computer allowed it to use smaller key sizes to achieve security equivalent to older algorithms like RSA, the smaller key sizes make ECC attackable with fewer qubits.
  - sampo 2y ago
    > I always assumed the obvious application was for Google to make a QaaS (Quantum as a Service) for factoring large primes. We are decades and decades away from the technology to be able to do that. The problem for Google is trying to find a practically useful use case a bit sooner than that.
bloomingkales 2y ago
but no one other than a quantum researcher cares about that problem. The better question may be why the rest of us don’t care about the same things. If we sat here in 2014 and pondered why neural net folks cared about particular problems, I’m not sure where we’d be. Faith and Vision are truly spiritual things, even in tech.
- bradleyjg 2y ago
  It’s a question of overpromising and underdelivering. I’m not anti science. The scientists should definitely go forth and science. It’s the marketing they are bad at. The boy who cried wolf is not a training manual.
  - samus 2y ago
    Scientists have to get good at marketing because they will not get funding otherwise. They have to pitch their research towards an interested panel though, whose members have background knowledge. This means that they can merely bend the truth and exaggerate the potential impact of their research. Popular science magazines are quite different. They publicize for views, and nobody cares how accurate they are. Presentations of a public company are somewhere in between. The target audience is not nearly as qualified as a scientific grant panel, but they can sell shares or even sue the company if it underdelivers on its promises.
- llm_trw 2y ago
  By 2014 NN folks, of which I was one for a decade by that point, were solving real world problems at above human capabilities. We'd been managing around human capabilities since around 2004 in certain tasks. There were actual industrial applications in 1994. You'd have to go back to the 1950s to find the type of research in neural networks that was of no practical application to anyone but NN researchers.
  - gedpeck 2y ago
    So go back to the 1950s and the point stands. What does it matter when the actual start date is in terms of the point being right or wrong?
winwang 2y ago
Note there's a caveat: problems in CS can be reduced to other problems in CS. If we solved SAT, well, no one cares about SAT, but traveling salesman obviously reduces to that. (disclaimer: I don't think that's what is going on here, I'd have to dig into it more)
- bradleyjg 2y ago
  They didn’t solve any kind of CS problem. As far as I can tell the problem they solved is “what is this complicated quantum system going to do” by building the complicated quantum system and seeing what it did. Then they claim it would take a gazillion years to simulate on a conventional computer. Which I’m sure is true.
- thaumasiotes 2y ago
  > If we solved SAT, well, no one cares about SAT Really? SAT is the question "I have a set of constraints. Is it possible to obey all of them at once?" If it were impossible to use that question to answer any other questions, I'm pretty sure there would be a lot of interest anyway. It's kind of like how a lot of people care about the determinant of a matrix, which is exactly the same question set against a much more restrictive set of possible constraints.
cwillu 2y ago
This will never be relevant for solving travelling salesmen problems. More relevantly, that line of experimentation is specifically to refute the notion that something unexpected will happen with the physics to break the computational scaling. Nobody with any credibility is claiming that the current experiments are useful for anything practical.
fennecfoxy 2y ago
I don't think they're building them for people like you, yet. Why does everyone think of anything that's announced or shown as if it's a commercial product on a shelf and marketed at them.
- bradleyjg 2y ago
  Because the ceo of a public company tweeted about it. If it was a professor at mit people wouldn’t jump to that conclusion.
Ntrails 2y ago
> The problem it solved would take a septillion years to do on a conventional computer And more importantly, the solution is not actually verified in any way. It might be wrong. I don't understand (as a complete laymen) why the milestone isn't something classically hard but easily verified (in line with you). I feel like it's weird because people have spent a lot of time telling me how trivially quantum computing will break encryption that defeats normal computers.
- stracer 2y ago
  > why the milestone isn't something classically hard but easily verified They're far from being able to do any such thing, so posing such milestone would make the field look stagnant and thus be a bad marketing and hurt the money stream. The "milestones" are chosen so that they are plausibly reachable in short time relevant to patrons/investors, because people working on this need to constantly demonstrate progress.
cooper_ganglia 2y ago
>Until then quantum computers are in the same category as commercial fusion. That category being: "Technologies We Will Have Unlocked Within 10 Years"
- bradleyjg 2y ago
  Are you a poster on slashdot in 1999? Because you are saying them same thing they did.
dividedcomet 2y ago
I feel like the problems airlines face when not running a hub-and-spoke model would be a good market for quantum computing? Could be totally wrong though. Lots and lots of variables and permutations and options to sift through.

asdasdsddd 2y ago

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kccqzy 2y ago

Google says the next step is to find a problem with real life application. From https://blog.google/technology/research/google-willow-quantum-chip/ https://blog.google/technology/research/google-willow-quantu... > The next challenge for the field is to demonstrate a first "useful, beyond-classical" computation on today's quantum chips that is relevant to a real-world application.

simpaticoder 2y ago
I always assumed the obvious application was for Google to make a QaaS (Quantum as a Service) for factoring large primes. One obvious big customer would be intellegence agencies, especially the NSA.
- thehappypm 2y ago
  Can you imagine? Send us a number, we send you the factors. And a bill. With lots of zeroes
- ilya_m 2y ago
  The only problem with this business model is that once you factored one number, you kill your market - people will stop using pre-quantum crypto. (The obvious retort is that NSA would have harvested a ton of RSA/EC-encrypted traffic by then and would keep cracking ciphers going back decades. Unfortunately, old secrets is a rapidly depreciating asset class.)
  - fooker 2y ago
    That's why it won't be a public market.
  - r0m4n0 2y ago
    Partially true. If you copy a ton of encrypted data today, you can maybe decrypt it tomorrow
  - red_admiral 2y ago
    If you can get a quantum computer to take discrete logarithms on secp256k1 or mess with SHA256, then you can either get $$$ very quickly or you nuke almost the entire crypto market. For the former, you'd have to keep your discovery secret but just be unusually good at minting new coins. Getting crypto coins to move over to post-quantum seems to me to be a much harder problem than e.g. rushing out a new version of TLS or SSH. The key to Satoshi's original coins is a rapidly _apprecicating_ secret at the moment, but paradoxically also one that might immediately crater out if someone actually discovers a generic way to break the crypto involved. I'm not an expert on this angle of things but: as far as I know, Shor's quantum algorithm breaks both RSA (factoring) and DSA (finite-field discrete logarithms). But I'm not sure if it works the same way against elliptic curves - or at least you'd probably need a bigger computer to attack the same level of security. It's not clear to me if a quantum computer could effectively attack SHA256, either: Shor definitely does not help, Grover cuts the search space from 256 to 128 bits but that's still not practical to iterate over.
    - kevvok 2y ago
      > But I'm not sure if it works the same way against elliptic curves - or at least you'd probably need a bigger computer to attack the same level of security. Elliptic curve cryptography is also based on the difficulty of computing discrete logarithms, which makes it vulnerable to Shor’s algorithm. Unfortunately, while the increased difficulty of brute forcing ECC with a classical computer allowed it to use smaller key sizes to achieve security equivalent to older algorithms like RSA, the smaller key sizes make ECC attackable with fewer qubits.
- sampo 2y ago
  > I always assumed the obvious application was for Google to make a QaaS (Quantum as a Service) for factoring large primes. We are decades and decades away from the technology to be able to do that. The problem for Google is trying to find a practically useful use case a bit sooner than that.

bloomingkales 2y ago

but no one other than a quantum researcher cares about that problem. The better question may be why the rest of us don’t care about the same things. If we sat here in 2014 and pondered why neural net folks cared about particular problems, I’m not sure where we’d be. Faith and Vision are truly spiritual things, even in tech.

bradleyjg 2y ago
It’s a question of overpromising and underdelivering. I’m not anti science. The scientists should definitely go forth and science. It’s the marketing they are bad at. The boy who cried wolf is not a training manual.
- samus 2y ago
  Scientists have to get good at marketing because they will not get funding otherwise. They have to pitch their research towards an interested panel though, whose members have background knowledge. This means that they can merely bend the truth and exaggerate the potential impact of their research. Popular science magazines are quite different. They publicize for views, and nobody cares how accurate they are. Presentations of a public company are somewhere in between. The target audience is not nearly as qualified as a scientific grant panel, but they can sell shares or even sue the company if it underdelivers on its promises.
llm_trw 2y ago
By 2014 NN folks, of which I was one for a decade by that point, were solving real world problems at above human capabilities. We'd been managing around human capabilities since around 2004 in certain tasks. There were actual industrial applications in 1994. You'd have to go back to the 1950s to find the type of research in neural networks that was of no practical application to anyone but NN researchers.
- gedpeck 2y ago
  So go back to the 1950s and the point stands. What does it matter when the actual start date is in terms of the point being right or wrong?

winwang 2y ago

Note there's a caveat: problems in CS can be reduced to other problems in CS. If we solved SAT, well, no one cares about SAT, but traveling salesman obviously reduces to that. (disclaimer: I don't think that's what is going on here, I'd have to dig into it more)

bradleyjg 2y ago
They didn’t solve any kind of CS problem. As far as I can tell the problem they solved is “what is this complicated quantum system going to do” by building the complicated quantum system and seeing what it did. Then they claim it would take a gazillion years to simulate on a conventional computer. Which I’m sure is true.
thaumasiotes 2y ago
> If we solved SAT, well, no one cares about SAT Really? SAT is the question "I have a set of constraints. Is it possible to obey all of them at once?" If it were impossible to use that question to answer any other questions, I'm pretty sure there would be a lot of interest anyway. It's kind of like how a lot of people care about the determinant of a matrix, which is exactly the same question set against a much more restrictive set of possible constraints.

cwillu 2y ago

This will never be relevant for solving travelling salesmen problems. More relevantly, that line of experimentation is specifically to refute the notion that something unexpected will happen with the physics to break the computational scaling. Nobody with any credibility is claiming that the current experiments are useful for anything practical.

fennecfoxy 2y ago

I don't think they're building them for people like you, yet. Why does everyone think of anything that's announced or shown as if it's a commercial product on a shelf and marketed at them.

bradleyjg 2y ago
Because the ceo of a public company tweeted about it. If it was a professor at mit people wouldn’t jump to that conclusion.

Ntrails 2y ago

> The problem it solved would take a septillion years to do on a conventional computer And more importantly, the solution is not actually verified in any way. It might be wrong. I don't understand (as a complete laymen) why the milestone isn't something classically hard but easily verified (in line with you). I feel like it's weird because people have spent a lot of time telling me how trivially quantum computing will break encryption that defeats normal computers.

stracer 2y ago
> why the milestone isn't something classically hard but easily verified They're far from being able to do any such thing, so posing such milestone would make the field look stagnant and thus be a bad marketing and hurt the money stream. The "milestones" are chosen so that they are plausibly reachable in short time relevant to patrons/investors, because people working on this need to constantly demonstrate progress.

cooper_ganglia 2y ago

>Until then quantum computers are in the same category as commercial fusion. That category being: "Technologies We Will Have Unlocked Within 10 Years"

bradleyjg 2y ago
Are you a poster on slashdot in 1999? Because you are saying them same thing they did.

dividedcomet 2y ago

I feel like the problems airlines face when not running a hub-and-spoke model would be a good market for quantum computing? Could be totally wrong though. Lots and lots of variables and permutations and options to sift through.