Poughkeepsie?
Where people go to pick their feet?
Poughkeepsie?
Ok.
cool
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It’s thought that quantum computers could find factors of large numbers efficiently, which is a threat against public-key crypto that currently makes secure connections on the internet so convenient.
As far as I know, quantum computing doesn’t pose any particular threat to the kinds of block ciphers you’d use to send data confidentially to a friend, though. I think a secure internet without public key crypto is conceivable, if terribly inconvenient.
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It looks like a supercomputer which might have been yanked out of “Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets” and plunked into “Superman III” with Richard Pryor.
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I found a proper copy of that image, so that you can see the whole cryostat’s worth of fancy things.
All the little silver wires are coaxial cables. Each gold-plated copper disk is at a different temperature, from probably 40k down to .002K. The smarts are in the can at the bottom center.
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To be clear, I don’t think it’s a scam in any sense of the word—any more than quantum theory itself is.* I’m just frustrated that it’s so hard to get a clear sense of the extent to which its theorized applications have come to fruition, or are expected to in a given time frame, and so forth. If the physicists and mathematicians and computer theorists who study it said, “Oh, no, nothing practical will ever come of this; it’s just an academic pursuit,” that’d be fine with me. But I don’t get any such clarity from what I’m able to understand of what I read.
* no, I don’t think quantum theory is a scam
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Count me as a luddite quantum-skeptic.
I attended an event at Caltech “One Entangled Evening” where they threw around Feynman’s name a lot to try to hype their Quantum Computing initiative. All the examples provided were big shiny promises of infinite compute power, all predicated on a big cloud “something magic happens here.”
They had demos proudly proclaiming that they’d open sourced the codebase on GitHub, and we could play with it, but nobody could show any actual examples of anything working.
Don’t get me wrong – I’ll be happy to eat these words some day, but as yet, I haven’t seen anything that passed the rudimentary reality test. I know people much smarter than me see the potential in quantum computing, but I also know people much smarter than me who have been expecting fusion power to be productized in ten years.
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Perhaps it’s a good thing that Quantum computers haven’t hit the “Hello world!” stage yet.
Or would that be “Goodbye world!”?
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how many qubits breaks public key? (or was it just rsa that was especially vuln not all public key?)
Yes and no.
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But can it play Pong?
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Don’t knock it. Poughkeepsie is basically my home town and it’s good to hear that IBM still has a presence there. They can use the jobs. Up until the 80’s IBM’s largest facility was in Poughkeepsie and surrounding Hudson Valley.
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The big machine boi will be housed in Poughkeepsie, NY.
…and simultaneously in Armonk, NY.
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What if we are the ones in a simulation, and quantum computing is actually something like a Speculative execution exploit (like Meltdown and Spectre) against the universe?
Just imagine, quantum computers finally start to become really interesting, we can finally do something with them, and then, just when we start to rely on them, the designers of the simulation we live in catch on and patch the code to prevent this behavior. All quantum computers could be broken in a instant.
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“It features more compact custom electronics for improving scaling and lower error rates, as well as a new processor design.”
I guess it is my lizard brain, but, “error rates” in Quantum Computing sound somehow more threatening than “error rates” in traditional computing; like the Quantum Computer is going to accidentally disprove something fundamental to our continued existence. Like that pi equals 3; and suddenly nothing works anymore.
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Ahh… SO pretty. I love it when actual scientists do the engineering and fab work; you can actually see the love…
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Well, no. Error rates in quantum computing generally make it harder to settle on the correct answer(s) to your problem, so everything takes longer, or perhaps even the system is too “noisy” to isolate the answer(s) at all.
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So you are saying quantum computing can never compute a answer to a question faster then we could do it with a regular computer? That seems to run counter to everything I heard about it thus far, and also would kinda defeat the purpose of the entire idea.
Sure it doesn’t work that well yet. But I’m sure we can agree it will keep on getting better with time?
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Just a quick aside for an idea that’s been rolling about in my mind for a bit: a person’s perception of the world around them is an approximation built from sensory input and existing memory. We all live in our own simulation, running locally.
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Perhaps the real quantum computing was the friends we made along the way.
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No, not even close to what I’m saying. Or, ya know, I would’a said that =).
Higher error rates, however, slow everything down, and at extreme levels, make the proper answer to your particular computing problem hard, or even impossible to discern. It literally gets “lost in the noise”.
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