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81 points teddyh | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.382s | source
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tomgag ◴[] 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. adgjlsfhk1 ◴[] No.44612270[source]
The thing that still feels off to me is that you should be able to run 8 bit Shors algorithm without error correction, right? Sure we don't have reliable error corrected q-bits, but being able to factor a number that small should be possible (even if it had a fairly high error rate) with current computers. Sure it won't be 100% reliable, but if we had published results that in 2010 it got the right answer 10% of the time, and in 2025 it gets the answer write 25% of the time, that would at least be a measure of progress.