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Comment by genr8 | Hacker News Reader

"At 10% threshold, assuming a 10-μs code cycle and non-local connections, one key can be generated every 10 minutes using 6000 modules with 1152 physical qubits each."

1152 qubits sounds like the D-Wave chips. So does that mean 6000 D-wave chips ?

Even if you reverse the calculation, that would be 60000 minutes on 1 chip, which is about 42 days only, so. Quantum Too Good

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The paper is about digital gate-based quantum computers. These have almost nothing in common with D-Wave's analogue quantum annealers. They certainly cannot run Shor's algorithm (they don't run algorithms at all).

If I remember correctly, the chips in D-Wave machines are for specific problems (optimization problems mostly), so it seems very unlikely they can run the quantum circuits proposed in the article.

Can those even perform shor's? I've read somewhere those are not suitable but I'm limited by a lack of actual knowledge here.

The D-Wave ones surely can't (theoretically unproven if it's doing anything 'useful', even if 'quantum').The ones that others have, theoretically can in the 'awesome future', but as yet can't (too noisy).

Hype aside - the largest number factored using Shor on a physical device is 21 (unclear if they actually used the result of the factoring to design the circuits like they did with 15).

That seems like a damning critique, but the reality is that quantum capabilities can and likely will advance as a series of step functions. The quantum machines we can build now are so noisy that we can’t even factor 3 digit numbers. However low nois quantum computers are on the drawing board and would bring many order of magnitude improvements nearly overnight.

> The quantum machines we can build now are so noisy that we can’t even factor 3 digit numbers.

Or most 2-digit numbers, for that matter. After more than a decade, the record still stands at 21=3x7 [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integer_factorization_records#...

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