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Replication of Quantum Factorisation Records with a VIC-20, an Abacus, and a Dog

(eprint.iacr.org)
81 points teddyh | 2 comments | 18 Jul 25 19:09 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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tomgag ◴[18 Jul 25 19:57 UTC] No.44609103[source]▶
I guess I'll post it here as well. This is my personal take on the whole story: https://gagliardoni.net/#20250714_ludd_grandpas

A relevant quote: "this is your daily reminder that "How large is the biggest number it can factorize" is NOT a good measure of progress in quantum computing. If you're still stuck in this mindset, you'll be up for a rude awakening."

Related: this is from Dan Bernstein: https://blog.cr.yp.to/20250118-flight.html#moon

A relevant quote: "Humans faced with disaster tend to optimistically imagine ways that the disaster will be avoided. Given the reality of more and more user data being encrypted with RSA and ECC, the world will be a better place if every effort to build a quantum computer runs into some insurmountable physical obstacle"

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1. kevinventullo ◴[18 Jul 25 20:58 UTC] No.44609761[source]▶
A better measure of progress (valid for cryptanalysis, which is, anyway, a very minor aspect of why QC are interesting IMHO) would be: how far are we from fully error-corrected and interconnected qubits? I don't know the answer, or at least I don't want to give estimates here. But I know that in the last 10 or more years, all objective indicators in progress that point to that cliff have been steadily improving: qubit fidelity, error rate, coherence time, interconnections... At this point I don't think it's wise to keep thrashing the field of quantum security as "academic paper churning".

I think the problem is that “objective indicators pointing to the cliff” is pretty handwavy. Could there be a widely agreed-upon function of qubit fidelity, error rate, coherence time, and interconnections that measures, even coarsely, how far we are from the cliff? It seems like the cliff has been ten years away for a very long time, so you might forgive an outsider for believing there has been a lot of motion without progress.

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2. wasabi991011 ◴[19 Jul 25 15:51 UTC] No.44616529[source]▶
> Could there be a widely agreed-upon function of qubit fidelity, error rate, coherence time, and interconnections that measures, even coarsely, how far we are from the cliff?

They've tried (like "Quantum Volume"), but it's really hard to summarize an entirely new computing paradigm into a single number, especially since different hardware platforms will make wildly different tradeoffs.