CassandrichFolks do realize the people telling you QC will be a thing and break RSA and EC are exactly the same folks who were telling you AGI will be a thing, who were the exact same folks telling you the metaverse is the next big thing, who are the exact same folks telling you NFTs would take off, who were the exact same folks telling you bitcoin would replace Visa, who were....
Jackie@dalias quantum computing will not take off because quantum physics makes it almost impossible
cyberia@burnoutqueen @dalias how come? I'm about to embark on a PhD in PQC so would be good to know this!
There is no known way to create the quantum superpositions at the scale required in an economical way. For all I know, you would need extreme cooling and a vacuum chamber to minimize any and all interference with the outside environment.
Even a little vibration in the system can ruin the whole thing
@burnoutqueen @dalias I mean sure, it's not on the cards right now. But my supervisor's justification is that if it's coming in 30 years we need to start preparing for it now.
@cyberia @burnoutqueen I don't think that's at all realistic. There have been a lot of very much exaggerated or outright fraudulent claims by people publishing results in QC, doing things like handwaving away precision/error-correction needs and using idealized QC simulators running on classical GPUs rather than actual QC, ignoring the exponential scaling.
@cyberia @burnoutqueen This paper seems to be a fairly sober look at the state of things: https://arxiv.org/html/2410.14397v1
@cyberia @burnoutqueen In particular, skimming through it for instances of the word "exponential" seems enlightening.
"Exponential" means "this is impossible, forever, with the current approach". It doesn't mean there's not some other approach we don't know exists, but it does mean that continuing on the same path will never get you there.
David Chasteen@burnoutqueen @cyberia @dalias NSA doesn't care about economical. Didn't Snowden reveal that NSA already had an outsized investment in this a decade ago? If they're making progress they'll keep it secret as long as possible. The fact that USG is moving to PQE seems like an indicator of how legitimate they think the threat is.
@Chasteen @burnoutqueen @cyberia There's $10 trillion "not economical", there's all-of-the-earth's energy-reserves-for-100-years "not economical", and there's millions-of-dyson-spheres "not economical".
LisPi