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The reasons you listed are exactly why the lack of factorization records should not be seen as a "critical black eye to this field", because they are not a rele
by tomgag 1y ago
The reasons you listed are exactly why the lack of factorization records should not be seen as a "critical black eye to this field", because they are not a relevant measure of progress. Again, think of the parallel with LLMs: it took decades to get out of the "AI winter", because that's what non-linear technological progress looks like.
With QC, the risk (and I am not saying this is going to happen, but I'm saying that it is a non-overlookable risk) is that we end up transitioning from "QC can only factorize 15" to "RSA-2048 is broken" in such a sudden way that the industry has no time to adapt.
- theuirvhhjj588 1y agoYou keep saying it's not a relevant figure, but that is absurd. Factorisation is one of the few problems that we know are in BQP \ P. You could make the argument that we're not at a stage where running Shor's alg. on integers is feasible hence integers don't capture the progress in the field... but that's perhaps too much honestly for a field that is riding on a bubble.
- wasabi991011 1y ago> You could make the argument that we're not at a stage where running Shor's alg. on integers is feasible hence integers don't capture the progress in the field... That's exactly what they are saying, and I'll say it too. Maybe they weren't explicit enough, but reread their comments as "not a relevant figure [to measure current progress].