Are these actually even useful yet? Genuine question. I never managed to solicit and answer, only long explanations which seemed to have an answer of yes and no at the same time depending on who you observe.
The long explanations boil down to this: quantum computers (so far) are better (given a million qubits) than classical computers at (problems that are in disguise) simulating quantum computers.
given a million qubits ...
"fault-tolerant quantum computing architecture based on noise-resilient, topologically protected Majorana-based qubits."
I'm not proud of my ignorance, and I sure hope that eventually if I get it, it'd be very useful for me. At least it worked like that for monads.
(note, I have no idea how the braiding happens, or what it means, or ... the rest of the fucking owl, but ... the part about the local indistinguishability is an important part of the puzzle, and why it helps against noise ... also have no idea what's the G-factor, but ... also have no idea what the s-wave/p-wave superconductors are, but ... https://www.reddit.com/r/AskPhysics/comments/11opcy1/comment... ... also ... phew )
Quantum computing is genuinely hard. The hardware is an extremely specialized discipline. The software is at best a very unfamiliar kind of mathematics, and has basically nothing to do with programming. At best, it may one day be a black box that you can use to solve certain conventional programming problems quickly.
Microsoft's technology is pretty far behind as far as capacity but the scaling limitations are less significant and the error-correction overhead is either eliminated or smaller.
https://youtu.be/wSHmygPQukQ?t=723
Is this the scaling problem you are describing?
It's a bit similar to the invention of fast Fourier transform (was reinvented several times...), O(n log n) is so much better than O(n*2) that many problems in science and technology use FFT somewhere in their pipeline, just because it's so powerful, even if unrelated to signal processing. For example, multiplication of very large numbers use FFT (?!).
Can you explain more or share some resources?
Any basic operation you can do with normal computing on bits can be done with reversible computing on bits provided that you have enough ancillary bits to store the information that would normally be deleted in the irreversible normal operation on bits.
As soon as the first practical quantum computer is made available, so much recorded TLS encrypted data is gonna get turned into plain text, probably destroying millions of people's lives. I hope everyone working in quantum research is aware of what their work is leading towards, they're not much better than arms manufacturers working on the next nuke.
I'm also curious. If you don't capture the key exchange but instead only a piece of cypher text. Is there a lower limit to the sample size required to attack the key? It feels like there must be.
but here’s what perplexity says: “Exponential Error Reduction: Willow demonstrates a scalable quantum error correction method, achieving an exponential reduction in error rates as the number of qubits increases125. This is crucial because qubits are prone to errors due to their sensitivity to environmental factors25. ”
It has progressed since: IBM Condor (demonstrated in december 2023) has 1121 qubits.
In the wake of cryptocurrency and AI failing to live up to their outrageous levels of hype, many people on this site worry that the "feel the AGI" crowd might accidentally start feeling some other, seemingly-profitable vaporware to overhype and pump.
Come to think of it, maybe we shouldn't invent quantum computers[0].
[0] Yes, even with the upside of permanently jailbreakable iPhones.
But if we were to get bigger and better quantum computers, we should use shor's algorithm. And that would, in fact, break the crypto behind HTTPS, SSH, smard-cards, and effectively all other forms of asymmetric crypto that are in use.
There is a question how likely bigger and better quantum computers are. A decent case can be made that it is unlikely they will grow fast. But it is going to far to say that shor's algorithm is useless because current quantum computers aren't good enough. You can't dismiss the possibility of quantum computer growth out of hand.
It is frustrating to try to unpick the hype and filter the “will never work” from the “eureka!”
Each "quantum" announcement will make it sound like they have accomplished massive scientific leaps but in reality absolutely no "quantum computer" today can do anything other than generating random numbers (but they are forced to make those announcements to justify their continued funding).
I usually get downvoted when making this statement (of fact) but please know that I don't hate these researches or their work and generally hope their developments turn into a real thing at some point (just like I hope fusion eventually turns into a real / net positive thing).