Quantum Computing...flop

General Privacy & Security
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Good news on the front of Quantum computing and the soon-to-be cryptopocalypse!
This article published on IEEE Spectrum Quantum Computing’s Hard, Cold Reality Check - IEEE Spectrum tempers the big hype and unrealistic promises:

  • it doesn’t look like we are going to see usable hardware any time soon

  • BIG problems with Qbits being error-prone and error correction mechanisms difficult to implement

  • the wide range of problems it would be able to solve is shrinking, to be very few in reality

  • companies quietly shifting resources away from the field

The first sentence of this article summarizes the situation quite well: “The quantum computer revolution may be further off and more limited than many have been led to believe.”

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That’s just what they want you to believe: :rofl:

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Thank you for the article.

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Except the very first time I heard about quantum computing I always saw more an encryption computing unit in it than anything else (and of course for some other very specific things). It still has the ability to strengthen encryption (but not to break all). On the other hand, who ever saw such a huge device on pictures (as on this article) understand, that’s still a very long way until it could be a co-processor on a common CPU - if even ever possible to reduce the size that much.

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Would that be a teraflop? And how many in a qubit?

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I’d be interested in your opinion and why you made this remark…

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I don’t have the opinion that this is disinformation but I was pointing out the possibility that it is - because of the impact on encryption and encryption algorithms.

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I think breaking public key crypto will be one of the first application attempted - this would be of so much value to all the spooks. This is one application where Q-computing could give exponential computational gains (factoring large primes)
That said, I consider IEEE to be serious and competent people.
Furthermore, I have seen other articles pointing out how this error correction problem is hard to solve and how this was not really expected. Just thinking you would need 1000 or more physical Qbits to have one “logical” Qbit that is reliable enough - and that you need several thousands of those logical Qbits for breaking RSA 2048 bits keys…

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