Sure -- you may not have had to do any of them in your long engineering career, but so what? You and I have both benefited from a long string of things that other scientists and engineers have solved in THEIR careers that we've never encountered in ours. Similarly, lots of people have benefited from things that you and I have done in our careers that they would say are about as useful as knowing the distance to the brightest start -- despite relying on those very things every day and just not being aware of how it impacts them.

How many people are even aware of special relativity and time dilation effects, except possibly as technobabble in a sci-fi show on the same level as tachyon-reversal-fields and the like? How many of those same people are completely reliant on GPS to find their way to a shopping mall or keep track of their car keys?

There are lots of very practical problems that are of extreme interest to lots of people that are way too computationally complex for classic computers to (likely) ever be able so solve in useful time frames. Some (not all) of these problems are well matched to the capabilities of quantum computers if they can be made to really work.

For instance, many companies and other large organizations need to solve large routing problems, such as the best was to schedule and route trains, planes, packages, or whatever. These are essentially variants of the Traveling Salesman Problem which grows way too large too fast for classic computers to even find a solution, let alone the optimal solution. So we have force the actual problem we are trying to solve into more-constrained versions for which current computers can find acceptable solutions (with 'acceptable' have a large degree of grudginess involved) in useful timeframes. Improvements in lots of ways -- faster service, lower cost, less pollution -- can be had if we could apply quantum computing to solve the actual problem in a reasonable time.

Then there's the whole lots-of-encryption-gets-broken-right-away aspect of it if they ever get quantum computers to work. I imagine you would find it very impactful on you personally if the encryption you rely on, namely RSA, for all of your online financial transactions -- or that the institutions that hold your funds rely on in their transactions -- fall prey to broken encryption because they thought quantum computing was no more useful than knowing the distance to the brightest star. I know I would.

I do not do financial transactions on line for that very reason. I regard the internet as providing about the same level of privacy as CB radio provides. Which is not very much, at all.

I had not thought about some of those other users who would probably benefit from faster computers. But that brings up the question of accuracy of the results. Consider that verifying the accuracy of software is much more expensive than creating it.

 

I do not do financial transactions on line for that very reason. I regard the internet as providing about the same level of privacy as CB radio provides. Which is not very much, at all.

I had not thought about some of those other users who would probably benefit from faster computers. But that brings up the question of accuracy of the results. Consider that verifying the accuracy of software is much more expensive than creating it.

The Internet is just a carrier, it doesn't provide native security or privacy just like the phone (that uses digital technology today) or a letter doesn't really provide those either. The privacy/security codes and protocols in today's online devices are more than adequate for consumer financial transactions, today. You don't normally break codes today by compute power as that's hard, you trick people (or scare them) into giving you their codes or they use codes that are so insecure compute power is not a problem.

There is a real QM threat to Public Key (management) systems like RSA but the main block and stream symmetric algorithms like AES will remain secure even if some future QM computer breaks RSA because by then RSA type asymmetrical key management systems will been replaced with QM resistant ones.

https://globalriskinstitute.org/publication/2023-quantum-threat-timeline-report/

 

I do not do financial transactions on line for that very reason. I regard the internet as providing about the same level of privacy as CB radio provides. Which is not very much, at all.

But whomever you do financial transactions with, like your bank, does.

Do you have any investments of any kind?

What will happen to the value of those investments if the stock markets get breached?

What will happen to things that impact you if that happens even if all of your money is in gold bullion in a sock drawer?

I had not thought about some of those other users who would probably benefit from faster computers. But that brings up the question of accuracy of the results. Consider that verifying the accuracy of software is much more expensive than creating it.

Many of the problems involved will be ones that the accuracy of the results can be verified from the results themselves, often in linear time, using classical computers. Others can at least be verified whether the result is useable even if it can't be verified that it is optimal.

 

https://www.theverge.com/2024/12/12/24319879/google-willow-cant-break-rsa-cryptography
Google says its breakthrough quantum chip can’t break modern cryptography
/ “The Willow chip is not capable of breaking modern cryptography,” Google’s director of quantum tells us.

But Willow is not a CRQC, according to Google. While the company does claim it can solve a computing challenge in five minutes that would take the world’s fastest supercomputer ten septillion years, Google has only produced 105 physical qubits worth of that computing power and suggests it would need millions to literally crack the codes.
“Estimates are we’re at least 10 years out from breaking RSA, and that around 4 million physical qubits would be required to do this,” Chou writes. She says Willow doesn’t change the timeline at all.

The Google benchmark is total hype.

 

https://www.theverge.com/2024/12/12/24319879/google-willow-cant-break-rsa-cryptography
Google says its breakthrough quantum chip can’t break modern cryptography
/ “The Willow chip is not capable of breaking modern cryptography,” Google’s director of quantum tells us.



The Google benchmark is total hype.

Ah, yes. The infamous "ten years away" mantra.

You would think that they would choose a different number, even if they had high confidence that, for once, it wasn't a lie.

I still want to see the actual problem that it solved in five minutes and a detailed analysis showing that it would take today's best supercomputers ten septillion years to solve that same problem.

 

https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=8525
The Google Willow thing
Yesterday I arrived in Santa Clara for the Q2B (Quantum 2 Business) conference, which starts this morning, and where I’ll be speaking Thursday on “Quantum Algorithms in 2024: How Should We Feel?” and also closing the conference via an Ask-Us-Anything session with John Preskill. (If you’re at Q2B, reader, come and say hi!)

Google has also announced a new quantum supremacy experiment on its 105-qubit chip, based on Random Circuit Sampling with 40 layers of gates. Notably, they say that, if you use the best currently-known simulation algorithms (based on Johnnie Gray’s optimized tensor network contraction), as well as an exascale supercomputer, their new experiment would take ~300 million years to simulate classically if memory is not an issue, or ~1025 years if memory is an issue (note that a mere ~1010 years have elapsed since the Big Bang). Probably some people have come here expecting me to debunk those numbers, but as far as I know they’re entirely correct, with the caveats stated. Naturally it’s possible that better classical simulation methods will be discovered, but meanwhile the experiments themselves will also rapidly improve.
Having said that, the biggest caveat to the “1025 years” result is one to which I fear Google drew insufficient attention. Namely, for the exact same reason why (as far as anyone knows) this quantum computation would take ~1025 years for a classical computer to simulate, it would also take ~1025 years for a classical computer to directly verify the quantum computer’s results!! (For example, by computing the “Linear Cross-Entropy” score of the outputs.) For this reason, all validation of Google’s new supremacy experiment is indirect, based on extrapolations from smaller circuits, ones for which a classical computer can feasibly check the results. To be clear, I personally see no reason to doubt those extrapolations. But for anyone who wonders why I’ve been obsessing for years about the need to design efficiently verifiable near-term quantum supremacy experiments: well, this is why! We’re now deeply into the unverifiable regime that I warned about.

https://x.com/skdh/status/1866352680899104960

I see a lot of confusion about Google's Monday press release about quantum supremacy, so let me try to clarify a few things. They say they did a computation on a ca 100 qubit chip much faster than a conventional (super)computer could do. The particular calculation in question is to produce a random distribution. The result of this calculation has no practical use. They use this particular problem because it has been formally proven (with some technical caveats) that the calculation is difficult to do on a conventional computer (because it uses a lot of entanglement). That also allows them to say things like "this would have taken a septillion years on a conventional computer" etc.
...
So while the announcement is super impressive from a scientific pov and all, the consequences for everyday life are zero. Estimates say that we will need about 1 million qubits for practically useful applications and we're still about 1 million qubits away from that. Also, it's been a recurring story that we have seen numerous times in the past years, that claims of quantum "utility" or quantum "advantage" or quantum "supremacy" or whatever you want to call it later evaporate because some other group finds a clever way to do it on a conventional computer after all.

It's for a calculation that's designed to run on machines with no practical applications, is practically useless and currently impossible to verify.

 

https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=8525
The Google Willow thing
Yesterday I arrived in Santa Clara for the Q2B (Quantum 2 Business) conference, which starts this morning, and where I’ll be speaking Thursday on “Quantum Algorithms in 2024: How Should We Feel?” and also closing the conference via an Ask-Us-Anything session with John Preskill. (If you’re at Q2B, reader, come and say hi!)


https://x.com/skdh/status/1866352680899104960


It's for a calculation that's designed to run on machines with no practical applications, is practically useless and currently impossible to verify.

I don't mind the practically useless part. It's a tool and measurement device and that's its usefulness. I do mind the currently impossible to verify part. There are lots of problems that, currently, are not only intractable to solve, but intractable to verify proposed solutions (the Traveling Salesman Problem being one of them), but there are plenty of others, such as the Hamiltonian Path Problem, that are intractable to solve but trivial to verify. The need to find one of those to use as their metric.

 

What I see about the claims for the new google device, is that "This is not the first time I have been lied to", and I do not think it will be the last.
The smell of "Specksmanship" is rather strong on these claims. So while it may be possible to show some tortured similarity to truth, there is no reason to accept the associated claims as meaningful.

 

https://www.livescience.com/technology/computing/what-is-quantum-supremacy

What is quantum supremacy?

But Benjamin said there is growing consensus in the field that this milestone won't be reached until we have fault-tolerant quantum computers. This will require quantum processors with many more qubits than we have today, he said, as the most well-studied quantum error-correction codes require on the order of 1,000 physical qubits to produce a single fault-tolerant, or logical, qubit.

With today's largest quantum computers having just crossed the 1,000-qubit mark, this is likely still some way off. "I'm optimistic that eventually such a quantum computer will exist, but I'm pessimistic that it will exist in the next five or 10 years," Fefferman said.

 

China’s New Quantum Machine Runs One Million Times Faster Than Google’s


​

Zuchongzhi-3 operates at an astonishing speed, performing computations 1015 times faster than the most powerful supercomputer available today and one million times faster than Google’s latest published quantum computing results. This achievement marks a major breakthrough in quantum computing, building on the success of its predecessor, Zuchongzhi-2.

 

China’s New Quantum Machine Runs One Million Times Faster Than Google’s
View attachment 344168
​

 

Microsoft under fire for claiming it has a new quantum computer


​

Last month Microsoft announced, with fanfare, that it had created a new kind of matter and used it to make a quantum computer architecture that could lead to machines “capable of solving meaningful, industrial-scale problems in years, not decades”.
But since then, the tech giant has increasingly come under fire from researchers who say it has done nothing of the sort. “My impression is that the response of the expert physics community has been overwhelmingly negative. Privately, people are just outraged,” says Sergey Frolov at the University of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

 

Considering how well microsopht has done in the past decades in producing bug-free operating systems, it is entirely possible that they have created something that runs quite fast, while not producing valid or useful results. AND, OF COURSE, there may also be a bit of stretching the truth. And it is likely that what they produced is the "IT DOES NOT MATTER" sort of new material.

 

Considering how well microsopht has done in the past decades in producing bug-free operating systems, it is entirely possible that they have created something that runs quite fast, while not producing valid or useful results. AND, OF COURSE, there may also be a bit of stretching the truth. And it is likely that what they produced is the "IT DOES NOT MATTER" sort of new material.

It might work but you have to keep turning it off and then back on again after every calculation
You also can't rely on the updates

 

The seriously disturbing fact now is that the similar scheme is being proposed for the computer driven cars: Frequent updates to change functions and "fix bugs".
What is never mentioned is the basic concept that it is OK to deliver buggy software.

How many people would be willing to own a car that needed to be recalled for major faults every week???
CERTAINLY, every fault or bug in a vehicle driving program is a major safety issue.
Just look at the number of automated updates that have introduced BUGs that had to be patched in a hurry.

The basic concept that "it is OK to release code that will need fixing" is the reason that computer driven cars is a really stupid idea.

 

The seriously disturbing fact now is that the similar scheme is being proposed for the computer driven cars: Frequent updates to change functions and "fix bugs".
What is never mentioned is the basic concept that it is OK to deliver buggy software.

How many people would be willing to own a car that needed to be recalled for major faults every week???
CERTAINLY, every fault or bug in a vehicle driving program is a major safety issue.
Just look at the number of automated updates that have introduced BUGs that had to be patched in a hurry.

The basic concept that "it is OK to release code that will need fixing" is the reason that computer driven cars is a really stupid idea.

That's good to think about. It's been this way with everything for a long time now.
Back in the 1980's that would not have been the case I don't think, but the development of software has gone downhill, and I mean seriously downhill, and that's with just about all software. They are allowed to get away with it, that's the main issue.

If that sounds bad, that's because it is. It's very bad, and the most notable are the now increasing number of data breaches. This bank, that bank, the next bank, every week it seems another data breach comes up, and some banks even ignore it for some period of time.

It could be because the "old" programmers were discarded, and the newbies were brought in to save money. They have very limited experience and that is a major factor in any field. Long time ago I've been taught computer programming by some very knowledgeable people who were already advanced in age, but they knew what they were talking about and had a lot of time in the field. They newer people are like little kids who don't have their priorities right yet, and that's because they don't even know what should be most important yet.
This is just my opinion, but it is what I have encountered in the past with various discussions with different people from different companies about software and how it works.

This also reminds me of a problem that came up in game play a lot time ago, specifically with the game of chess. It was a sort of proverb at the time that when someone gets a chess computer it makes them a worse over-the-board chess player. That's because chess computers allow you to take back a move. Once you start taking back moves, you lose that discipline to make the best move the first time. The parallel I think is that once you allow a plethora of updates, you lose the discipline to get them right the first time. What the heck, you can always update again, right? I think that is the deteriorating mentality we are seeing with most software now, and it's just been getting worse and worse in the most important areas.
I also do not believe that one single company should have control over the software of some 200 million computers around the world.
Maybe these are just my opinions but that seems to be the case from what I am seeing in software over the past 40 years or so.

 

You will notice that nobody except me calls them "Computer driven" cars. That is very deliberate, because we are mostly aware of how often computers are either unable to handle an exception, or else they just totally freeze for a while.
And of course, with the weekly required updates, who wants a car that does things differently every week. Even when it might be an improvement.

 

You will notice that nobody except me calls them "Computer driven" cars. That is very deliberate, because we are mostly aware of how often computers are either unable to handle an exception, or else they just totally freeze for a while.
And of course, with the weekly required updates, who wants a car that does things differently every week. Even when it might be an improvement.

Yes, for good reasons.

Nothing wrong with computer driven cars or airplanes or any other device. It's the self-driving part that's the issue today.

 

Yes, for good reasons.

Nothing wrong with computer driven cars or airplanes or any other device. It's the self-driving part that's the issue today.

It seems we have a failure to communicate here. Computers ASSISTING the driver by improving perception of conditions is totally different! In those computer-aided vehicles it is always a human making the decisions, with the computers assisting.
What I mean by "computer driven" is the computer making all of the decisions. "Self-driving" is a verbal cheating trick to take away the word "computer" from the control of driving.

 

It seems we have a failure to communicate here. Computers ASSISTING the driver by improving perception of conditions is totally different! In those computer-aided vehicles it is always a human making the decisions, with the computers assisting.
What I mean by "computer driven" is the computer making all of the decisions. "Self-driving" is a verbal cheating trick to take away the word "computer" from the control of driving.

That's why you're the only one using the term in that way. The failure is IMO on your end for using the term "computer driven" incorrectly. Self driving (primitive systems were) can be completely analog. They tested driverless cars in Nebraska 60 years ago.