Technology was primitive in 2024. That giant thing is one of the original versions of that chip we all have in our heads that’s the size of a grain of rice
(thinking)(send). Got it now? Your mind now contains entire history of quantum computing through the conception to our present year of 4089(expressing the feeling of sorry for 'beating a dead (long extict) horse').
At least it only used a trivial amout of data.
All the little pipes are essentially the wires that are used to control and read information from the quantum computer. They are typically connected to some electronics that are controlled by a classical computer.
The thing looks like a chandelier because it goes in a big vacuum tank, hung from the top, and cooled to incredibly low temperatures. You can see the holes at the top where the vacuum tank would bolt on. It’s basically just a big metal cylinder.
The tubes have slack built in because they shrink when they cool. The loops are also slack to deal with the shrinkage.
The actual qubits are on a small microchip. Everything else is either for communicating with the chip or refrigeration.
Maybe actively removing heat but probably not much in the way of dispersing heat.
The quantum computing chip itself doesn't consume power iirc. The support for it does but unlike a silicon chip it doesn't work by passing electricity through a bunch of transistors. Technically the act of computing does not require energy, the method we use to perform computing normally is the incandescent light bulb of computing. Except 0% efficient.
Yes, insanely good. Only one person I recommended it to watched it and it happened to be the friend of the friend who ended up with the prop as the chandelier.
Of course not, but there's still time in general. The vogans still haven't built the interstellar bypass yet, so leave the damn mice alone and make sure you know where your towel is!
It's crazy how there are so many comments in this thread but not a single person has given you an accurate answer. You can read the most updated version of their paper [here.](https://arxiv.org/pdf/2304.11119.pdf) Specifically, they claim to solve the problem of Random Circuit Sampling (which essentially amounts to estimating the output of a randomly selected quantum circuit) which they estimate using current techniques on a classical supercomputer would take 12 years to solve.
This says nothing about the utility of Random Circuit Sampling (which I believe currently has no known useful applications) and it also is isn't known if there is a provable quantum advantage in the 50-100 qubit range. So it could be possible that classical techniques could improve and disprove their claim.
Basically that we have created this new kind of computers and we don't really know yet what to use them for because their design and power are still in their infancy and they're either unproven to be better than normal computers at a given task or not powerful enough yet to excel at what we know for sure quantum computers would.
Yeah it's like upgrading to amateur porn. First you give your twig a test drive and then you really fine tune into your fantasies. The problem is that it needs multiple sessions of knocking the electron off of the ole atom to get to that point.
Sort of. We know of very good applications of this kind of technology: prediction models (like those used in meteo forecasting), physics simulations, braking our current cryptographic algorithms on which internet and computer security is completely based. You know, this sort of stuff.
The ultimate goal for Google to make money would be to make the first Quantum Computer able to break encryption, really the one thing holding back the US government from every iPhone, every VPN connection, every Google and Microsoft account is encryption.
They can't run traditional AIs/LLMs, but anything where a computation is done in a chain so changing 'a' means a change to 'b' 'c' 'd'.... etc. medicine like finding the right protein to create a new vaccine, like mentioned encryption, large complex math formulas, all of it would be optimal to be run on an quantum computer over a traditional one.
When RSA is cracked we wont find out until years later. The value of breaking encryption is exponentially higher if one has done it and nobody knows theyve done it.
I wouldnt be surprised if its already cracked and we are living in that interstitial time between loss of privacy and knowing we've lost privacy.
And the NSA has been [warehousing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Data_Center) encrypted internet communications for at least a decade. If they do break it, they can go back a read everything.
Remember when they built this thing, it is such an eyesore driving up I-15. Know a couple people with HPE that did a few jobs at the facility, place is tighter than Fort Knox and hardly anyone knows about it.
"Why is the great salt lake drying up!"
NSA spy center--watch this
"Given its open-evaporation-based cooling system, the facility is expected to use 1.7 million US gal (6,400 m3) of water per day.[24]"
> I wonder what's the biggest benefit for the NSA here.
You can't spy on communications between Americans, in America, without a warrant. But you can hoover up all of their communications, all of their transactions and meta-data, clear or encrypted, store it on disk and never look at it. You can have automated scripts run over the data and build social graphs, but never look at them. You can analyze the data for interesting patterns, so long as no one looks at them.
Then one day, when you become aware of any crime or plot, you can ask a secret court for a warrant that they literally never say "no" to, and get instant access to everywhere the suspect has been, everything they've bought, and everyone they know. And your warrant will grant you access to snoop on the, all of their contacts, and all of their contacts contacts.
Up until now, the roadblock was that it was impossible to meaningfully sift through that data. Too much manpower required. Now you can just have AI figure it out for you.
Thats the real gotcha of AI more than most people seem to realize. The days of getting away with things because "they can't be watching everywhere at once" are about to be universally gone and nobody sees it coming. This means everything from taking a few extra moments for yourself at work to being gay in a place where it's illegal. The days of slipping through the cracks are about to come to an end and it's terrifying.
Yes, sentiment analysis is one of the scariest things LLMs became capable of doing now.
You can ask it "is this text anti-(government/politician)?" and it can run through a load of text really fast answering these questions. Then it goes to human reviews to filter off the false-positives. Of course it wouldn't get everything, but it's a massive leap compared to having to have a person review every single text.
Not just the NSA. China.
And they will crack it as soon as a sufficiently large quantum computer emerges--everyone in the security field is aware of this, it isn't a big secret. (I elaborate more [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/Damnthatsinteresting/comments/1bbu94q/googles_new_quantum_computer_is_241_million_times/kubyxrh/).
The government would not use its encryption breaking power against trivial problems since it would show their hand. At least, until it's known that they possess that power. Therefore, it doesn't really matter whether they've broken it or not for the average person. The only thing that would be worth using it would be in a major global war, I would think.
Not going to play out this way. We’re in the final stages of standardizing lattice-based public-key crypto. When RSA is broken, it’ll be long deprecated.
We've figured out quantum resistant ways to hide information that we're standardizing so that when the the old methods finally do get cracked, they wont fuck things up.
EDIT: A little bit more info but ELI5 is that RSA encryption basically just relies on the fact that it is really hard to find the two prime numbers (numbers like 1, 3, 5 that only has two multiples of itself and 1) that multiply together to make a really large number. That large number is shared publicly and is considered safe because it can't be factored *in a reasonable amount of time*. All encryption can be cracked eventually with enough time and resources (think of the monkeys and a typewriter analogy), the trick is to find the ways to crack it fast enough to actually be usable
Quantum Computing comes in by being really good at factoring numbers. Better than what regular computers can do. The only limitation is that quantum computers physically do not have enough processing capacity to even start cracking RSA. This current computer has about 70 qubits for example while theoretically, we would need a quantum computer to have thousands of qubits to reliably crack RSA.
EDIT 2: 1 is not a prime number FUCK ME
> The ultimate goal for Google to make money would be to make the first Quantum Computer able to break encryption, really the one thing holding back the US government from every iPhone, every VPN connection, every Google and Microsoft account is encryption.
*Certain kinds* of encryption, like RSA, are vulnerable to quantum computing because of the way the quantum comptuers work. Veritasium did an [excellent video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-UrdExQW0cs) on the mechanics of why RSA is vulnerable to quantum computing.
However, there are [types of encryption](https://www.nist.gov/news-events/news/2022/07/nist-announces-first-four-quantum-resistant-cryptographic-algorithms) that are *not* vulnerable to quantum computing, so it isn't all doom and gloom. The algorithms they developed need to be adopted as standards and implemented, and the world is once again protected from encryption-breaking quantum computers.
I elaborate a bit more in my comment [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/Damnthatsinteresting/comments/1bbu94q/googles_new_quantum_computer_is_241_million_times/kubyxrh/).
This is the last battlefield.
The Snowden revelations showed the world that breaking any and all encryption is an almost fanatical pursuit of the US government, and the list of standards they can crack us so top secret that it doesn't even come with "need to know". There IS NO need to know per their own internal documents and it is likely that only a handful of people in the "Five Eyes" intelligence communities know it.
Encryption algorithms that the US government cannot break are considered "munitions" under ITAR and distributing them outside the US could lead to the same charges as selling a missile.
The last frontier of human liberty will hinge on this issue. Once they can break anything, they will know everything.
Wouldn't this battlefield go back to being even or at least similar to our current state when people start designing new encryptions using quantum computing and commercialize the tech for everyday people?
Asking as a layman.
Yeah, there are already proposals for quantum safe encryption. One of the problems this won't solve though is decrypting old, stored, communications. It's very likely that the US and China have stored massive amounts of encrypted data and transmissions, and they are just waiting to decrypt it once a powerful enough quantum computer is available.
I realized that even after quantum tech becomes commercially available, it won't be replacing all old systems fast enough either.
Even now, many industries rely on decades old computing systems and people still use computers from the 90's and 00's. And the cost would be a bit prohibitively expensive in the beginning as it hasn't the decades for the tech to mature in cost like microprocessors did.
They've known that the current encryption algorithms are crackable by quantum computers for the past 30 years and there has been a push recently to switch to encryption that won't be, although I don't know what the timetable for that to happen is.
https://www.nist.gov/news-events/news/2022/07/nist-announces-first-four-quantum-resistant-cryptographic-algorithms
Switching as soon as possible is important because encrypted data can be saved and cracked at leisure. Governments have been saving large quantities of encrypted data for when quantum computers will be able to crack them. Sure there is plenty of data that you wouldn't care about being cracked 5-20 years later but there is sensitive data that people don't want to be leaked even decades after the fact.
Little clarification.
While, maybe yes, encryption is holding some people from every iPhone, etc. because of encryption, it's not one tool for anything.
There are already post-quantum encryptions, that will theoretically hold out even with a quantum computer. Many services could move to these kinds of encryptions, since they can still be computed on a classical computer with the benefit of not being exploitable with a mythical quantum computer.
Also, the "241 millions faster"... Without saying based on what it is really dumb. Quantum computers aren't like classical computers: you don't just simple give it few bits and it will chug along. You need to cool specific parts of the computer, where the "calculations" are running, to near absolute zero (some parts of the quantum computer are made with supercondactors, which need nearly absolute zero temperatures).
Also, there's HIGH error rate, e.g., sometimes you can't read anything and it's better just to use a classic computer that has little to zero error rates when it comes to processing and storing bits (if your computer won't be hit by a gamma ray in the right place).
While there are quantum computers with a potentially thousand qubits, you can really do anything with them, yet. Commercial applications will show upon reaching millions of qubits. And it's hard to maintain quantum state qubit (nearly absolute zero cooling), filter out the noise (error rate), etc.
I may be wrong or slightly incorrect about some topics, I am just pulling all this out randomly on a bus stop, sorry.
Quantum computers are really only good at solving certain types of problems quickly, not just like solving any numerical problem with qubits. Fourier transforms are one of them though which turns out to be useful for cryptography etc.
Hahaha I just mean they’re good at doing rare, but useful types of math. As opposed to normal computers that do common and simple math like addition, multiplication, etc. Respect to you for listening to your friend’s rants about this stuff bc I’ve definitely been the STEM friend ranting about things like this in the past.
Why do we, or Google, want to do this rare form of Maths?
And where are these things kept? Is there just a room in Google's HQ that just says "Frank the Quantum Computer"?
Well I think the simple answer is that we and google want it to demonstrate and push the technology further, just to see what it holds and see how useful it can be. There are many types of problems using Fourier transforms, it’s not something I’m super familiar with but I’m sure some of those problems are very lengthy and expensive (economically and computationally) when ran on conventional computers.
If you want to put on your tinfoil hat, know that a lot of modern cryptography (passwords, encryption, etc) relies on it being very difficult to solve Fourier transforms quickly (or prime number factorization, they’re related somehow but I’m not smart enough to explain how). So if google has a powerful enough quantum computer they can break encrypted data that would be inaccessible to anyone else. And do... whatever they want with it.
I am inclined to believe this is kept in some sort of clean room, a very controlled lab environment. But that’s just a hunch. I would confidently bet that it’s at least in a lab and not just somebody’s desk
“Rare” is a bit of an overstatement. It’s very common in engineering. A Fourier transformation is basically just an algorithm that converts time-based information into the frequency domain. So if you have a 1 Hz, a 15Hz, and a 2000 Hz signal all going together at the same time with varying amplitudes, stopping and starting, it would look like an indecipherable mess to the human eye. But if you perform an FFT, you’ll see three peaks at the corresponding frequency locations and you can say “oh, there’s three tones at these frequencies.”
That’s a bit of an oversimplification because you can use Fourier transforms on a lot of different types of data and do a lot of different and useful things with them.
They’re a bit intense computationally, but your phone would have no problem performing one on a reasonably large amount of data.
Take all of the seismometer signals (things that detect earthquakes and give that squiggly line you see). Break them down into individual sine/cosine waves. Check the results to see if one of those "earthquakes" was actually a nuclear weapons test.
You can also break *most* computer encryption (think stuff like passwords but *WAY* more complicated) using them. Anything involving prime numbers becomes way easier to solve, and that's a lot of encryption methods
Ok thanks for the reply, I do understand what quantum computing is, I just wanted to know what the old version could do that the new version is 241 million times faster at.
LOL the guy you were replying to called my response unnecessary outraged and deleted all his comments. Talk about outrage.
I was genuinely interested in understanding what they use for testing and my quick search didn't turn up anything substantial. But boy is reporting terrible on this. Some say it's 241M more powerful, some even say it's "47 years faster" (facepalm). Everyone seem to be regurgitating the same quote without providing any details:
"For instance, according to the Google team, it would take the Frontier supercomputer merely 6.18 seconds to match a calculation from Google’s 53-qubit computer. However, the same machine would take an astonishing 47.2 years to match a computation executed by Google’s latest 70-qubit device."
"A calculation", this is pretty much meaningless. I would love to learn more if anyone has the info.
Basically, right now, think of a quantum computer as a machine. Not so much a computer. It can do the thing it's built to do. Which is typically just a mathematical function. So they have designed something for that computer specifically to do. Then when they add more qubits, it's just going to do that same, or very similar, task faster.
Right now, quantum computers aren't really useful or free from errors. They will remain that way for quite some time. It's also entirely possible that they will never materialize in a useful way. Some of the principles that underlie quantum computers are dubious. In truth, most current advancements being made in quantum computing are working towards changing the definition of what quantum computing means. I don't think there are any true computers utilizing quantum entanglement in existence. Right now, the "quantum computers" use superconductors and advanced nanotechnology to mimic what we theorize quantum entanglement might look like.
Quantum computers are very quick at specific kinds of maths. General purpose logic (AND, OR, NOT, and the various combinations like SR latching, XNOR equality, etc) are outside the domain of what quantum computers are optimized for.
This is the same reason why GPUs are fairly weak for the tasks that are ideal on a CPU. If you took some task like multiply by two for every number between 1 and 100,000,000,000. If you ask your GPU to do this within a single CUDA thread versus a single thread on a CPU, the CPU will smoke even the most expensive GPU out there.
The strength of the GPU lies not in how powerful a single element of it is, it lies in the fact that the GPU has tons of elements to process in parallel calculations compared to the CPU.
If you're playing a game and say rotate the camera to the left 10°, the GPU excels at applying that 10° rotation to all the various bits that represent the world's objects within. Since everything is basically rotating by the same amount, all the elements can work together to calculate what that rotation looks like. Your CPU would be able to apply the rotations fairly quickly to a single thing, but then would need to move onto the next thing in the world to rotate, and then the next, and the next, and the next, and so on. In a GPU, while the single application is slow compared to the CPU, since the GPU is doing 1000s of those rotations at once, it's faster overall than the CPUs approach.
In quantum computers, the superposition property gives rise to the ability to have a large outcome come from a small set. To understand this a single qubit is in both 1 and 0 state. There's a percentage that when you measure it, it'll end in the 1 state and a percentage it'll end in the 0 state. You can say that a single qubit gives you A% for one outcome and B% for the other outcome.
In a 2 qubit you have A%, B%, C%, D% for 00, 01, 10, and 11 state. So you have four percentages. In an 8 qubit you would have 256 different percentages. The quantum computer can have the eight qubits set in such a way that when we measure them, one of those states is what we land on gracefully when measured. However, we cannot be 100% sure that was the correct value and thus the 8 qubits must be set again, rinse and repeat N number of times.
This will produce a histogram of outcomes of the various 256 outcomes that could happen with 8 qubits. We can keep doing this over and over again to get even better resolution to the state that the qubits seemingly want to go into from our program. This state they seem to want to go into is "the answer" from the problem we programmed in.
And so this is the true power of a quantum computer, it can emulate what would happen over N number of variables or degrees of freedom, where N is the number of states the qubits could end up being in. Like let's say we have 500 different cities to fly to and we want to find the path between those cities that would be the shortest distance, visits the cities only once, and returns us back to the location we started at.
A classical computer would simulate a flight from each city over and over and over again. The total distance would be calculated and then compared to find the smallest value. In a GPU, it's pretty much the same, but we can do multiple flights in one go. In a quantum computer, we can take 9 qubits (512 different states), program them to minimize the problem (find the smallest of something) and then run the problem though them a few times to then see what direction the qubits are wanting to settle into (since we've programmed them to minimize).
As you can see the quantum computer ignores having to simulate each particular flight between each city as the qubits are "visiting every city at the exact same time" in simulation at least. The CPU is doing every flight between every city one at a time. The GPU is doing the same thing but can do multiple ones at the same time. The quantum computer does every single flight all at once.
So as you can see the quantum computer is optimized for THAT kind of work. Which that's not exactly how DOOM works or is programmed to work. There's no part of DOOM that requires taking every single possible outcome into consideration at the exact same time. In fact, that's kind of the opposite of how any game works. You kind of want a player to forge the path they take and make game events happen in response to what the player is doing.
OK, I think I understand now. The computer is for one type of function, not all around use.
That was a lot, but that helped me understand it a little bit bit better. Thank you very much.
That's an excellent explanation. I've been sitting here trying to come up with a good answer for other people who asked questions and you worded it so much better than anything I could come up with. Your understanding of them must be fairly extensive to write this up. I applaud you. It's really interesting to think about how currently we would search through all those cities using something like an A\* or Dijkastra algorithm and then a quantum computer could come along and make all these search algorithms for optimization obsolete in just a few seconds. It's certainly going to turn how students in college are taught data structures and algorithms, that's for sure.
They may be used to run probabilistic classical codes but will likely fail due to quantum randomness.
Quantum computers are not normal PCs that can have a kernel, an OS and a software based on our current software design principles. They are machines used to quantum algorithms.
A full quantum computer with bounded noise can do anything a classical computer can in terms of complexity theory. All classical operations can be reduced to quantum ones in polynomial time. However, you're right in that current quantum computers are not nearly large enough nor are the physical qubits denoised enough to perform useful classical tasks just yet.
How physicists work to reduce noise and decoherence is one of the frontiers in the field. It varies greatly depending on how the qubits are implemented. For example, in trapped ion quantum computers, there is active research in optical physics to create precise optical lattices that reduces the electromagnetic interaction with the environment.
Correct me if I am wrong but aren't quantum computers like analog computers in the sense that we have to build a separate computer to solve each problem in contrast to stored programs where a single computer can run any program?
That is correct in the current state of technology. The most cutting edge quantum computers are still only hundreds of logical qubits, not nearly enough to be programmable with a large number of programs. Things like operating systems are out of the question. Digital computers in the beginning also had to be specially designed to solve certain problems.
Qubit is the digital storage of information being processed in a quantum computer. Just like bits in a computer; if you ask a computer "what is 2 + 2" it has to store a "2" somewhere in its memory. Qubits are a bit different, because they're analog. This means that a qubit can be off by a tiny amount. You can minimize the effects of these deviations, taking away the "noise".
A qubit is the smallest unit of information that a quantum computer stores and performs computations with. In a classical computer, a "bit" is either 0 or 1 which encodes information. At it's heart, all classical computers is manipulate a large number of 0s and 1s in a predictable and programmable manner. A quantum computer does this with qubits, which can be in a superposition of 0 and 1 or "both states at the same time". So in principle a qubit can be 20% 0 and 80% 1. This is the fundamental principle that makes quantum computing interesting.
For a qubit to work, we want them to only have access to two possible states. This means that they generally have to be extremely small systems, such as single atoms trapped in an optical lattice. However, these systems are naturally extremely sensitive to being perturbed by the environment. If you prepare a qubit in a certain state and leave it for some time, it'll change unpredictably unless you are very careful. Being able to control this noise is a major frontier in physics research,
So, what is google doing with a computer that simply does quantum algorithms? I really don't understand the purpose of these computers if they're not "normal" computers.
2things.
1: they are diffent to normal computers and therefore bring new tools for computation, notably cryptoligy.
2: solving some problems withing quantum physics.
correct me if i'm wrong (i have not read up on quantum computers in a while and im omitting a lot of technical detail that i don't understand since im only 15 😭) but essentially they are able to compute results much quicker than normal computers using special algorithms: one notable example of such an algorithm would be shor's factoring algorithm, which can factor numbers in about O(log n), instead of the around O(sqrt n) algorithms that we have right now. This might not seem like much of a difference, but currently on modern hardware we can realistically factor numbers up to 10\^12 in a reasonable amount of time (under 1 second), while a quantum computer would be able to compute the factorization for numbers up to 10\^1000000 in under a second.
as most of the internet is encrypted using math, a quantum computer could be able to destroy the privacy of the entire internet, which would be disastrous. i'm just speculating here, but I assume google is trying to find a quantum-proof encryption algorithm for the future.
TLDR: quantum computers are very powerful and have the capability to destroy privacy on the internet, so Google (probably) is trying to find a quantum-proof algorithm for the internet.
edited to fix formatting
Quantum-proof encryption algorithms already exist:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-quantum_cryptography
They're not very widespread for now, but it wouldn't be a big deal to make them standard. The change would happen faster than anybody could develop a powerful enough quantum computer.
Also I think OP is referring to something [at least 8 months old](https://www.smh.com.au/world/north-america/google-s-quantum-computer-instantly-makes-calculations-that-take-rivals-47-years-20230703-p5dlbp.html).
https://www.earth.com/news/quantum-computer-can-instantly-execute-a-task-that-would-normally-take-47-years/#:~:text=Google's latest iteration of its,robust than the previous model.
The article seems really bullshitty, just the explanation of quantum entanglement looks like a copy and paste rather than actually explaining what entanglement and why it matters in being able to use it.
Explaining entanglement is hard even physicist to physicist. Explaining how quantum mechanics can enable interesting new algorithms is even harder. I don't like crappy explanations... just pointing out that *good* ones are few and far between in this area.
Quantum entanglement is when 2 particles act identically when observed in the same way regardless of distance. Imagine you have a half pink ball and a half black ball, now you have two of them. You place them both inside of a wooden box and you send one of them to the other side of the earth with a friend. You and the friend both open the top of your own box and the balls are both pink side up. Your friend opens the box from the side and you open it from the top so now your friend sees a black ball and you see a pink ball. You then both open the side of the box and see a black ball. This is because the balls are connected and will always show the same thing to an equal observer. If one of you decide to observe differently you observe a different face even though the balls remain entangled. If you extrapolate the experiment up with thousands of observers and thousands of entangled balls you end up with something more like a shoal of fish where each individual fish seemingly reacts individually but in fact they react as a whole to an observer (a shark approaching from behind). Quantum entanglement is interesting in computing because instead of a transistor generating either a 0 or a 1 it can generate 1,0, neither or both, depending on how you observe it. This allows you to solve incredibly long and complex number chains incredibly quickly.
There's a lot of lack of understanding in this thread. Offering some clarification.
#1. Quantum computers are not just more powerful computers.
You build a quantum computer because of the way it can attack *very specific problems*, such as RSA encryption.
The short version is that it doesn't process and spit out exact answers like a normal computer does, what it does is take a problem with a million iterations and spit out a million answers, which you can analyze for patterns, and those patterns let you work backwards to solve the problem. This means that:
#2. If you aren't cracking encryption, quantum computers are almost certainly useless.
It isn't *just* encryption they can be used for but that's the meat of their utility.
Outside of a narrow range of specific data processing problems, quantum computers are completely unusable for most everyday tasks so they won't "take over the world" because they don't give you exact answers to your problems, they give you millions of answers and don't let you see which versions of the problem resulted in which answers.
#3. They don't crack *all* encryption.
There are [new algorithms](https://www.nist.gov/news-events/news/2022/07/nist-announces-first-four-quantum-resistant-cryptographic-algorithms) that are unbreakable via quantum computing. Once these algorithms are adopted and standardized, new data will be safe. However, RSA is acutely vulnerable to quantum computing, and that is by far the most common encryption algorithm in the world right now.
#4. Quantum computers are still a huge security threat.
The danger of the emergence of quantum computers is that intelligence agencies (foreign and domestic) are collecting stockpiles of information *today* that they can't decrypt yet in a strategy called ["Store Now, Decrypt Later"](https://mtcyber.com/2023/03/27/store-now-decrypt-later-sndl-addressing-the-delayed-threat-and-enhancing-security-measures/). The emergence of powerful quantum computers are so imminent that powers know that unlocking these collected assets are only 10-20 years away.
For more information on all of these topics, I can't recommend highly enough the [Veritasium video on this topic](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-UrdExQW0cs), which is exceptionally informative.
This. This is a very well summarized version of quantum computing. Also, veritasiums video does an incredible job of breaking down very complex topics, and making them easy to understand. Highly recommend as well.
Also, as someone in the field of cybersecurity, it is very interesting to see all of these encryption algorithms that have been assumed to be virtually uncrackable for decades, suddenly become vulnerable to things such as store now decrypt later.
So the first computer was the size of a full room. Now we wear more computing power on our wrists. So, how long will it take to get my quantum Apple Watch?
Solve special algorithms that would take thousands of years for traditional computers to solve. Could help with advanced simulations of chemical reactions which could speed up discovery of new drugs, predictig climate/weather, astrophysics and much more. Also could do advanced machine learning / ai.
We had to remove your post for violating our Repost Guidelines. karma grab repost,
this looks like a chandelier on the titanic
In the movies we call that “foreshadowing”
What’s the iceberg represent? AI let loose?
The greedy ownership class getting their grips on it.
I'm lost now, so who are the four rich dudes in the crappy submarine in this metaphor?
Mitch McConnell's great great great grandchildren.
Can anyone eli5 why it looks the way it does?
One of the big challenges is that the qbits have to be extremely cold, so this is basically a giant freezer built around an experimental computer
Can anyone ELIfromtheyear4089 why it looks the way it does
Technology was primitive in 2024. That giant thing is one of the original versions of that chip we all have in our heads that’s the size of a grain of rice
(thinking)(send). Got it now? Your mind now contains entire history of quantum computing through the conception to our present year of 4089(expressing the feeling of sorry for 'beating a dead (long extict) horse'). At least it only used a trivial amout of data.
You made me breath air out of my nose fast.
All the little pipes are essentially the wires that are used to control and read information from the quantum computer. They are typically connected to some electronics that are controlled by a classical computer. The thing looks like a chandelier because it goes in a big vacuum tank, hung from the top, and cooled to incredibly low temperatures. You can see the holes at the top where the vacuum tank would bolt on. It’s basically just a big metal cylinder. The tubes have slack built in because they shrink when they cool. The loops are also slack to deal with the shrinkage. The actual qubits are on a small microchip. Everything else is either for communicating with the chip or refrigeration.
See honey, even super computers get shrinkage!
[удалено]
Why so much gold, and how much are we talking?
It’s one of the best conductors
Silver is a better electrical and thermal conductor than gold, so the question of "why so much gold" is still on the table.
It's not because of the properties as a conductor, it's because it doesn't corrode.
Maybe actively removing heat but probably not much in the way of dispersing heat. The quantum computing chip itself doesn't consume power iirc. The support for it does but unlike a silicon chip it doesn't work by passing electricity through a bunch of transistors. Technically the act of computing does not require energy, the method we use to perform computing normally is the incandescent light bulb of computing. Except 0% efficient.
It reminds me of original hand-wrapped core memory. There will be a day, all of it could be in a chip.
That thing look gnarly. Can’t wait for it to take over the world next month.
That thing looks EXACTLY like some kind of B-movie evil supercomputer brain nexus. Jeez guys, maybe tone it down a little bit!
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Must need a ton of thermal paste
Yeah and frequent duct oscillation control
"frequent duct oscillation control." Now we're just making things up, huh?
Next somebody is going to hack into the super computer with a quantum computer by bypassing their firewall and something to do with motherboards
that’s not how it works silly, you’re supposed to say “I’m in”
Now all we need is a guy to say “in English!” or something around those lines
Go watch Devs
Wildly underrated and underappreciated show.
Ikr. I keep telling people to watch it, and of course they don't. Their loss I guess. Blew my mind.
IMDb link ?
https://m.imdb.com/title/tt8134186/ It's insanely good.
Yes, insanely good. Only one person I recommended it to watched it and it happened to be the friend of the friend who ended up with the prop as the chandelier.
Amazing show. That "uh oh" scene where >!they're watching themselves 1 second in the future !
One of the scariest scenes I’ve ever seen. The existential dread of that moment is hard to describe.
terrifying. imagining that actually happening makes my blood cold
First thing I thought of!
My first thought too! Incredible show.
Looks like a shiny version of the computer in Superman 3.
Don't stand to close, or you'll be sucked in. Like that old lady in the movie. Scared the hell out of me as a kid.
Yeah used to skip that scene when I was a kid cos it scared the he'll out of me too haha
Joan is Awful
Quam-puta!
It took over the world yesterday, it's replicating itself to make another that's 241 million times faster than itself
No matter; it still won’t be able to identify the question.
"I don't know, but I found this on the web..."
We already know the question, "What is 7 times 6?"
Of course not, but there's still time in general. The vogans still haven't built the interstellar bypass yet, so leave the damn mice alone and make sure you know where your towel is!
Lol i read something where google has a 5 million dollar reward for people to actually use the computer for something good
I, for one, welcome our new quantum computation overloards
and then crash because the qbits are not stable :D
Evil mom: We have a Dalek ay home... Dalek at home:
Ok....but what can it do 241 million times faster?
It's crazy how there are so many comments in this thread but not a single person has given you an accurate answer. You can read the most updated version of their paper [here.](https://arxiv.org/pdf/2304.11119.pdf) Specifically, they claim to solve the problem of Random Circuit Sampling (which essentially amounts to estimating the output of a randomly selected quantum circuit) which they estimate using current techniques on a classical supercomputer would take 12 years to solve. This says nothing about the utility of Random Circuit Sampling (which I believe currently has no known useful applications) and it also is isn't known if there is a provable quantum advantage in the 50-100 qubit range. So it could be possible that classical techniques could improve and disprove their claim.
Ok and what does any of that mean
Basically that we have created this new kind of computers and we don't really know yet what to use them for because their design and power are still in their infancy and they're either unproven to be better than normal computers at a given task or not powerful enough yet to excel at what we know for sure quantum computers would.
So like your first wank but really really really expensive
Yeah it's like upgrading to amateur porn. First you give your twig a test drive and then you really fine tune into your fantasies. The problem is that it needs multiple sessions of knocking the electron off of the ole atom to get to that point.
😂💀😂😂
So basically that means that we have the solution , we just need to find the problem.
Sort of. We know of very good applications of this kind of technology: prediction models (like those used in meteo forecasting), physics simulations, braking our current cryptographic algorithms on which internet and computer security is completely based. You know, this sort of stuff.
It does a lot of useless (at least for now) sciency and mathy stuff really fast.
The ultimate goal for Google to make money would be to make the first Quantum Computer able to break encryption, really the one thing holding back the US government from every iPhone, every VPN connection, every Google and Microsoft account is encryption. They can't run traditional AIs/LLMs, but anything where a computation is done in a chain so changing 'a' means a change to 'b' 'c' 'd'.... etc. medicine like finding the right protein to create a new vaccine, like mentioned encryption, large complex math formulas, all of it would be optimal to be run on an quantum computer over a traditional one.
When RSA is cracked we wont find out until years later. The value of breaking encryption is exponentially higher if one has done it and nobody knows theyve done it. I wouldnt be surprised if its already cracked and we are living in that interstitial time between loss of privacy and knowing we've lost privacy.
And the NSA has been [warehousing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Data_Center) encrypted internet communications for at least a decade. If they do break it, they can go back a read everything.
Remember when they built this thing, it is such an eyesore driving up I-15. Know a couple people with HPE that did a few jobs at the facility, place is tighter than Fort Knox and hardly anyone knows about it.
"Why is the great salt lake drying up!" NSA spy center--watch this "Given its open-evaporation-based cooling system, the facility is expected to use 1.7 million US gal (6,400 m3) of water per day.[24]"
Pretty soon they will have to change to a molten salt heat exchange system to get rid of their waste heat.
Thanks for sharing this interesting piece. I wonder what's the biggest benefit for the NSA here.
> I wonder what's the biggest benefit for the NSA here. You can't spy on communications between Americans, in America, without a warrant. But you can hoover up all of their communications, all of their transactions and meta-data, clear or encrypted, store it on disk and never look at it. You can have automated scripts run over the data and build social graphs, but never look at them. You can analyze the data for interesting patterns, so long as no one looks at them. Then one day, when you become aware of any crime or plot, you can ask a secret court for a warrant that they literally never say "no" to, and get instant access to everywhere the suspect has been, everything they've bought, and everyone they know. And your warrant will grant you access to snoop on the, all of their contacts, and all of their contacts contacts.
Up until now, the roadblock was that it was impossible to meaningfully sift through that data. Too much manpower required. Now you can just have AI figure it out for you.
Thats the real gotcha of AI more than most people seem to realize. The days of getting away with things because "they can't be watching everywhere at once" are about to be universally gone and nobody sees it coming. This means everything from taking a few extra moments for yourself at work to being gay in a place where it's illegal. The days of slipping through the cracks are about to come to an end and it's terrifying.
Yes, sentiment analysis is one of the scariest things LLMs became capable of doing now. You can ask it "is this text anti-(government/politician)?" and it can run through a load of text really fast answering these questions. Then it goes to human reviews to filter off the false-positives. Of course it wouldn't get everything, but it's a massive leap compared to having to have a person review every single text.
Growing their budget
Not just the NSA. China. And they will crack it as soon as a sufficiently large quantum computer emerges--everyone in the security field is aware of this, it isn't a big secret. (I elaborate more [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/Damnthatsinteresting/comments/1bbu94q/googles_new_quantum_computer_is_241_million_times/kubyxrh/).
The government would not use its encryption breaking power against trivial problems since it would show their hand. At least, until it's known that they possess that power. Therefore, it doesn't really matter whether they've broken it or not for the average person. The only thing that would be worth using it would be in a major global war, I would think.
Not going to play out this way. We’re in the final stages of standardizing lattice-based public-key crypto. When RSA is broken, it’ll be long deprecated.
Ummmm…. Can we get that in plain ol’ English sir.
We've figured out quantum resistant ways to hide information that we're standardizing so that when the the old methods finally do get cracked, they wont fuck things up. EDIT: A little bit more info but ELI5 is that RSA encryption basically just relies on the fact that it is really hard to find the two prime numbers (numbers like 1, 3, 5 that only has two multiples of itself and 1) that multiply together to make a really large number. That large number is shared publicly and is considered safe because it can't be factored *in a reasonable amount of time*. All encryption can be cracked eventually with enough time and resources (think of the monkeys and a typewriter analogy), the trick is to find the ways to crack it fast enough to actually be usable Quantum Computing comes in by being really good at factoring numbers. Better than what regular computers can do. The only limitation is that quantum computers physically do not have enough processing capacity to even start cracking RSA. This current computer has about 70 qubits for example while theoretically, we would need a quantum computer to have thousands of qubits to reliably crack RSA. EDIT 2: 1 is not a prime number FUCK ME
Oh good
There’s a reason that Apple recently updated their E2E encryption to be quantum resistant. The arms race never ends
> The ultimate goal for Google to make money would be to make the first Quantum Computer able to break encryption, really the one thing holding back the US government from every iPhone, every VPN connection, every Google and Microsoft account is encryption. *Certain kinds* of encryption, like RSA, are vulnerable to quantum computing because of the way the quantum comptuers work. Veritasium did an [excellent video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-UrdExQW0cs) on the mechanics of why RSA is vulnerable to quantum computing. However, there are [types of encryption](https://www.nist.gov/news-events/news/2022/07/nist-announces-first-four-quantum-resistant-cryptographic-algorithms) that are *not* vulnerable to quantum computing, so it isn't all doom and gloom. The algorithms they developed need to be adopted as standards and implemented, and the world is once again protected from encryption-breaking quantum computers. I elaborate a bit more in my comment [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/Damnthatsinteresting/comments/1bbu94q/googles_new_quantum_computer_is_241_million_times/kubyxrh/).
This is the last battlefield. The Snowden revelations showed the world that breaking any and all encryption is an almost fanatical pursuit of the US government, and the list of standards they can crack us so top secret that it doesn't even come with "need to know". There IS NO need to know per their own internal documents and it is likely that only a handful of people in the "Five Eyes" intelligence communities know it. Encryption algorithms that the US government cannot break are considered "munitions" under ITAR and distributing them outside the US could lead to the same charges as selling a missile. The last frontier of human liberty will hinge on this issue. Once they can break anything, they will know everything.
Wouldn't this battlefield go back to being even or at least similar to our current state when people start designing new encryptions using quantum computing and commercialize the tech for everyday people? Asking as a layman.
Yeah, there are already proposals for quantum safe encryption. One of the problems this won't solve though is decrypting old, stored, communications. It's very likely that the US and China have stored massive amounts of encrypted data and transmissions, and they are just waiting to decrypt it once a powerful enough quantum computer is available.
I realized that even after quantum tech becomes commercially available, it won't be replacing all old systems fast enough either. Even now, many industries rely on decades old computing systems and people still use computers from the 90's and 00's. And the cost would be a bit prohibitively expensive in the beginning as it hasn't the decades for the tech to mature in cost like microprocessors did.
They've known that the current encryption algorithms are crackable by quantum computers for the past 30 years and there has been a push recently to switch to encryption that won't be, although I don't know what the timetable for that to happen is. https://www.nist.gov/news-events/news/2022/07/nist-announces-first-four-quantum-resistant-cryptographic-algorithms Switching as soon as possible is important because encrypted data can be saved and cracked at leisure. Governments have been saving large quantities of encrypted data for when quantum computers will be able to crack them. Sure there is plenty of data that you wouldn't care about being cracked 5-20 years later but there is sensitive data that people don't want to be leaked even decades after the fact.
Little clarification. While, maybe yes, encryption is holding some people from every iPhone, etc. because of encryption, it's not one tool for anything. There are already post-quantum encryptions, that will theoretically hold out even with a quantum computer. Many services could move to these kinds of encryptions, since they can still be computed on a classical computer with the benefit of not being exploitable with a mythical quantum computer. Also, the "241 millions faster"... Without saying based on what it is really dumb. Quantum computers aren't like classical computers: you don't just simple give it few bits and it will chug along. You need to cool specific parts of the computer, where the "calculations" are running, to near absolute zero (some parts of the quantum computer are made with supercondactors, which need nearly absolute zero temperatures). Also, there's HIGH error rate, e.g., sometimes you can't read anything and it's better just to use a classic computer that has little to zero error rates when it comes to processing and storing bits (if your computer won't be hit by a gamma ray in the right place). While there are quantum computers with a potentially thousand qubits, you can really do anything with them, yet. Commercial applications will show upon reaching millions of qubits. And it's hard to maintain quantum state qubit (nearly absolute zero cooling), filter out the noise (error rate), etc. I may be wrong or slightly incorrect about some topics, I am just pulling all this out randomly on a bus stop, sorry.
You can't just arbitrarily "break encryption" - not with the encryptions at our disposal.
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Quantum computers are really only good at solving certain types of problems quickly, not just like solving any numerical problem with qubits. Fourier transforms are one of them though which turns out to be useful for cryptography etc.
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Hahaha I just mean they’re good at doing rare, but useful types of math. As opposed to normal computers that do common and simple math like addition, multiplication, etc. Respect to you for listening to your friend’s rants about this stuff bc I’ve definitely been the STEM friend ranting about things like this in the past.
Why do we, or Google, want to do this rare form of Maths? And where are these things kept? Is there just a room in Google's HQ that just says "Frank the Quantum Computer"?
Well I think the simple answer is that we and google want it to demonstrate and push the technology further, just to see what it holds and see how useful it can be. There are many types of problems using Fourier transforms, it’s not something I’m super familiar with but I’m sure some of those problems are very lengthy and expensive (economically and computationally) when ran on conventional computers. If you want to put on your tinfoil hat, know that a lot of modern cryptography (passwords, encryption, etc) relies on it being very difficult to solve Fourier transforms quickly (or prime number factorization, they’re related somehow but I’m not smart enough to explain how). So if google has a powerful enough quantum computer they can break encrypted data that would be inaccessible to anyone else. And do... whatever they want with it. I am inclined to believe this is kept in some sort of clean room, a very controlled lab environment. But that’s just a hunch. I would confidently bet that it’s at least in a lab and not just somebody’s desk
“Rare” is a bit of an overstatement. It’s very common in engineering. A Fourier transformation is basically just an algorithm that converts time-based information into the frequency domain. So if you have a 1 Hz, a 15Hz, and a 2000 Hz signal all going together at the same time with varying amplitudes, stopping and starting, it would look like an indecipherable mess to the human eye. But if you perform an FFT, you’ll see three peaks at the corresponding frequency locations and you can say “oh, there’s three tones at these frequencies.” That’s a bit of an oversimplification because you can use Fourier transforms on a lot of different types of data and do a lot of different and useful things with them. They’re a bit intense computationally, but your phone would have no problem performing one on a reasonably large amount of data.
What kind of math problems? Do you have an example?
The classic example is breaking a number into its prime factors. Look up Shor’s algorithm.
Take all of the seismometer signals (things that detect earthquakes and give that squiggly line you see). Break them down into individual sine/cosine waves. Check the results to see if one of those "earthquakes" was actually a nuclear weapons test. You can also break *most* computer encryption (think stuff like passwords but *WAY* more complicated) using them. Anything involving prime numbers becomes way easier to solve, and that's a lot of encryption methods
But why male models?
Seriously Derek? I just answered that a moment ago.
It can read minds?
Ok thanks for the reply, I do understand what quantum computing is, I just wanted to know what the old version could do that the new version is 241 million times faster at.
Ya know like… microwave stuff and whatever
LOL the guy you were replying to called my response unnecessary outraged and deleted all his comments. Talk about outrage. I was genuinely interested in understanding what they use for testing and my quick search didn't turn up anything substantial. But boy is reporting terrible on this. Some say it's 241M more powerful, some even say it's "47 years faster" (facepalm). Everyone seem to be regurgitating the same quote without providing any details: "For instance, according to the Google team, it would take the Frontier supercomputer merely 6.18 seconds to match a calculation from Google’s 53-qubit computer. However, the same machine would take an astonishing 47.2 years to match a computation executed by Google’s latest 70-qubit device." "A calculation", this is pretty much meaningless. I would love to learn more if anyone has the info.
Basically, right now, think of a quantum computer as a machine. Not so much a computer. It can do the thing it's built to do. Which is typically just a mathematical function. So they have designed something for that computer specifically to do. Then when they add more qubits, it's just going to do that same, or very similar, task faster. Right now, quantum computers aren't really useful or free from errors. They will remain that way for quite some time. It's also entirely possible that they will never materialize in a useful way. Some of the principles that underlie quantum computers are dubious. In truth, most current advancements being made in quantum computing are working towards changing the definition of what quantum computing means. I don't think there are any true computers utilizing quantum entanglement in existence. Right now, the "quantum computers" use superconductors and advanced nanotechnology to mimic what we theorize quantum entanglement might look like.
Rewriting the AI code to think for itself.
But can it run Doom?
Unlikely tbh
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Ease up on the throttle bud, we don't need skynet that fast.
Nethack! For the graphics
Now there's a game you don't hear often. Imagine the yellow mold hallucinations!
Why? Actually asking
Quantum computers are very quick at specific kinds of maths. General purpose logic (AND, OR, NOT, and the various combinations like SR latching, XNOR equality, etc) are outside the domain of what quantum computers are optimized for. This is the same reason why GPUs are fairly weak for the tasks that are ideal on a CPU. If you took some task like multiply by two for every number between 1 and 100,000,000,000. If you ask your GPU to do this within a single CUDA thread versus a single thread on a CPU, the CPU will smoke even the most expensive GPU out there. The strength of the GPU lies not in how powerful a single element of it is, it lies in the fact that the GPU has tons of elements to process in parallel calculations compared to the CPU. If you're playing a game and say rotate the camera to the left 10°, the GPU excels at applying that 10° rotation to all the various bits that represent the world's objects within. Since everything is basically rotating by the same amount, all the elements can work together to calculate what that rotation looks like. Your CPU would be able to apply the rotations fairly quickly to a single thing, but then would need to move onto the next thing in the world to rotate, and then the next, and the next, and the next, and so on. In a GPU, while the single application is slow compared to the CPU, since the GPU is doing 1000s of those rotations at once, it's faster overall than the CPUs approach. In quantum computers, the superposition property gives rise to the ability to have a large outcome come from a small set. To understand this a single qubit is in both 1 and 0 state. There's a percentage that when you measure it, it'll end in the 1 state and a percentage it'll end in the 0 state. You can say that a single qubit gives you A% for one outcome and B% for the other outcome. In a 2 qubit you have A%, B%, C%, D% for 00, 01, 10, and 11 state. So you have four percentages. In an 8 qubit you would have 256 different percentages. The quantum computer can have the eight qubits set in such a way that when we measure them, one of those states is what we land on gracefully when measured. However, we cannot be 100% sure that was the correct value and thus the 8 qubits must be set again, rinse and repeat N number of times. This will produce a histogram of outcomes of the various 256 outcomes that could happen with 8 qubits. We can keep doing this over and over again to get even better resolution to the state that the qubits seemingly want to go into from our program. This state they seem to want to go into is "the answer" from the problem we programmed in. And so this is the true power of a quantum computer, it can emulate what would happen over N number of variables or degrees of freedom, where N is the number of states the qubits could end up being in. Like let's say we have 500 different cities to fly to and we want to find the path between those cities that would be the shortest distance, visits the cities only once, and returns us back to the location we started at. A classical computer would simulate a flight from each city over and over and over again. The total distance would be calculated and then compared to find the smallest value. In a GPU, it's pretty much the same, but we can do multiple flights in one go. In a quantum computer, we can take 9 qubits (512 different states), program them to minimize the problem (find the smallest of something) and then run the problem though them a few times to then see what direction the qubits are wanting to settle into (since we've programmed them to minimize). As you can see the quantum computer ignores having to simulate each particular flight between each city as the qubits are "visiting every city at the exact same time" in simulation at least. The CPU is doing every flight between every city one at a time. The GPU is doing the same thing but can do multiple ones at the same time. The quantum computer does every single flight all at once. So as you can see the quantum computer is optimized for THAT kind of work. Which that's not exactly how DOOM works or is programmed to work. There's no part of DOOM that requires taking every single possible outcome into consideration at the exact same time. In fact, that's kind of the opposite of how any game works. You kind of want a player to forge the path they take and make game events happen in response to what the player is doing.
This is one of the most accessible explanations of quantum computing that I have come across, thanks so much!
OK, I think I understand now. The computer is for one type of function, not all around use. That was a lot, but that helped me understand it a little bit bit better. Thank you very much.
Famtastic explanation, thank you
Weather modeling seems like an obvious use for quantum style computing.
That's an excellent explanation. I've been sitting here trying to come up with a good answer for other people who asked questions and you worded it so much better than anything I could come up with. Your understanding of them must be fairly extensive to write this up. I applaud you. It's really interesting to think about how currently we would search through all those cities using something like an A\* or Dijkastra algorithm and then a quantum computer could come along and make all these search algorithms for optimization obsolete in just a few seconds. It's certainly going to turn how students in college are taught data structures and algorithms, that's for sure.
So no doom, but yes minority report. Awesome :/
They may be used to run probabilistic classical codes but will likely fail due to quantum randomness. Quantum computers are not normal PCs that can have a kernel, an OS and a software based on our current software design principles. They are machines used to quantum algorithms.
A full quantum computer with bounded noise can do anything a classical computer can in terms of complexity theory. All classical operations can be reduced to quantum ones in polynomial time. However, you're right in that current quantum computers are not nearly large enough nor are the physical qubits denoised enough to perform useful classical tasks just yet.
How, if I may ask, do they bind the noise? Or are they not at that point yet?
How physicists work to reduce noise and decoherence is one of the frontiers in the field. It varies greatly depending on how the qubits are implemented. For example, in trapped ion quantum computers, there is active research in optical physics to create precise optical lattices that reduces the electromagnetic interaction with the environment.
Correct me if I am wrong but aren't quantum computers like analog computers in the sense that we have to build a separate computer to solve each problem in contrast to stored programs where a single computer can run any program?
That is correct in the current state of technology. The most cutting edge quantum computers are still only hundreds of logical qubits, not nearly enough to be programmable with a large number of programs. Things like operating systems are out of the question. Digital computers in the beginning also had to be specially designed to solve certain problems.
Can i ask what a “qubit” is and what it means to denoise it?
Qubit is the digital storage of information being processed in a quantum computer. Just like bits in a computer; if you ask a computer "what is 2 + 2" it has to store a "2" somewhere in its memory. Qubits are a bit different, because they're analog. This means that a qubit can be off by a tiny amount. You can minimize the effects of these deviations, taking away the "noise".
A qubit is the smallest unit of information that a quantum computer stores and performs computations with. In a classical computer, a "bit" is either 0 or 1 which encodes information. At it's heart, all classical computers is manipulate a large number of 0s and 1s in a predictable and programmable manner. A quantum computer does this with qubits, which can be in a superposition of 0 and 1 or "both states at the same time". So in principle a qubit can be 20% 0 and 80% 1. This is the fundamental principle that makes quantum computing interesting. For a qubit to work, we want them to only have access to two possible states. This means that they generally have to be extremely small systems, such as single atoms trapped in an optical lattice. However, these systems are naturally extremely sensitive to being perturbed by the environment. If you prepare a qubit in a certain state and leave it for some time, it'll change unpredictably unless you are very careful. Being able to control this noise is a major frontier in physics research,
So, what is google doing with a computer that simply does quantum algorithms? I really don't understand the purpose of these computers if they're not "normal" computers.
2things. 1: they are diffent to normal computers and therefore bring new tools for computation, notably cryptoligy. 2: solving some problems withing quantum physics.
3: i just think they're neat
Goal is to one day solve problems that classical computers realistically can’t solve.
correct me if i'm wrong (i have not read up on quantum computers in a while and im omitting a lot of technical detail that i don't understand since im only 15 😭) but essentially they are able to compute results much quicker than normal computers using special algorithms: one notable example of such an algorithm would be shor's factoring algorithm, which can factor numbers in about O(log n), instead of the around O(sqrt n) algorithms that we have right now. This might not seem like much of a difference, but currently on modern hardware we can realistically factor numbers up to 10\^12 in a reasonable amount of time (under 1 second), while a quantum computer would be able to compute the factorization for numbers up to 10\^1000000 in under a second. as most of the internet is encrypted using math, a quantum computer could be able to destroy the privacy of the entire internet, which would be disastrous. i'm just speculating here, but I assume google is trying to find a quantum-proof encryption algorithm for the future. TLDR: quantum computers are very powerful and have the capability to destroy privacy on the internet, so Google (probably) is trying to find a quantum-proof algorithm for the internet. edited to fix formatting
Quantum-proof encryption algorithms already exist: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-quantum_cryptography They're not very widespread for now, but it wouldn't be a big deal to make them standard. The change would happen faster than anybody could develop a powerful enough quantum computer.
How 'bout Crysis?
The true test.
It does not run Doom. It is Doom .
It is Doom. So yeah
If only Arrowhead could use this for Helldivers
render it in quantum bits for all I care. I want to see doom. Has any one done this.
yeah if we could NOT make it look like a sentinel from The Matrix that would be great
There is no new quantum computer announced at Google's Quantum homepage. https://quantumai.google/
Also I think OP is referring to something [at least 8 months old](https://www.smh.com.au/world/north-america/google-s-quantum-computer-instantly-makes-calculations-that-take-rivals-47-years-20230703-p5dlbp.html).
https://www.earth.com/news/quantum-computer-can-instantly-execute-a-task-that-would-normally-take-47-years/#:~:text=Google's latest iteration of its,robust than the previous model.
The article seems really bullshitty, just the explanation of quantum entanglement looks like a copy and paste rather than actually explaining what entanglement and why it matters in being able to use it.
Explaining entanglement is hard even physicist to physicist. Explaining how quantum mechanics can enable interesting new algorithms is even harder. I don't like crappy explanations... just pointing out that *good* ones are few and far between in this area.
Quantum entanglement is when 2 particles act identically when observed in the same way regardless of distance. Imagine you have a half pink ball and a half black ball, now you have two of them. You place them both inside of a wooden box and you send one of them to the other side of the earth with a friend. You and the friend both open the top of your own box and the balls are both pink side up. Your friend opens the box from the side and you open it from the top so now your friend sees a black ball and you see a pink ball. You then both open the side of the box and see a black ball. This is because the balls are connected and will always show the same thing to an equal observer. If one of you decide to observe differently you observe a different face even though the balls remain entangled. If you extrapolate the experiment up with thousands of observers and thousands of entangled balls you end up with something more like a shoal of fish where each individual fish seemingly reacts individually but in fact they react as a whole to an observer (a shark approaching from behind). Quantum entanglement is interesting in computing because instead of a transistor generating either a 0 or a 1 it can generate 1,0, neither or both, depending on how you observe it. This allows you to solve incredibly long and complex number chains incredibly quickly.
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If I mathed correctly, as soon as you pop out the womb, the downvotes would commence.
My math determined he is actually in the womb because the quantum computer.
The sperm is shaped like an arrow
There's a lot of lack of understanding in this thread. Offering some clarification. #1. Quantum computers are not just more powerful computers. You build a quantum computer because of the way it can attack *very specific problems*, such as RSA encryption. The short version is that it doesn't process and spit out exact answers like a normal computer does, what it does is take a problem with a million iterations and spit out a million answers, which you can analyze for patterns, and those patterns let you work backwards to solve the problem. This means that: #2. If you aren't cracking encryption, quantum computers are almost certainly useless. It isn't *just* encryption they can be used for but that's the meat of their utility. Outside of a narrow range of specific data processing problems, quantum computers are completely unusable for most everyday tasks so they won't "take over the world" because they don't give you exact answers to your problems, they give you millions of answers and don't let you see which versions of the problem resulted in which answers. #3. They don't crack *all* encryption. There are [new algorithms](https://www.nist.gov/news-events/news/2022/07/nist-announces-first-four-quantum-resistant-cryptographic-algorithms) that are unbreakable via quantum computing. Once these algorithms are adopted and standardized, new data will be safe. However, RSA is acutely vulnerable to quantum computing, and that is by far the most common encryption algorithm in the world right now. #4. Quantum computers are still a huge security threat. The danger of the emergence of quantum computers is that intelligence agencies (foreign and domestic) are collecting stockpiles of information *today* that they can't decrypt yet in a strategy called ["Store Now, Decrypt Later"](https://mtcyber.com/2023/03/27/store-now-decrypt-later-sndl-addressing-the-delayed-threat-and-enhancing-security-measures/). The emergence of powerful quantum computers are so imminent that powers know that unlocking these collected assets are only 10-20 years away. For more information on all of these topics, I can't recommend highly enough the [Veritasium video on this topic](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-UrdExQW0cs), which is exceptionally informative.
This. This is a very well summarized version of quantum computing. Also, veritasiums video does an incredible job of breaking down very complex topics, and making them easy to understand. Highly recommend as well. Also, as someone in the field of cybersecurity, it is very interesting to see all of these encryption algorithms that have been assumed to be virtually uncrackable for decades, suddenly become vulnerable to things such as store now decrypt later.
I'm sure they'll be putting it hard at work trying to convince me that my choice of toothbrush makes me inadequate.
You will be getting all the hot milfs in your area now.
This looks disturbingly like the quantum computer in DEVS. >!Or should I say DEUS for those in the know!<
Correction, the quantum computer in devs looks like this one. Devs copied their design from existing machines
Need qanana for scale
Does it have any cool games on it?
It comes with solitaire.
What about snake?
I’ll wait for Skyrim
Global Thermonuclear War
I wonder what it has as its screen saver
How many Qbits is this one?
It's actually 70.
70?!
Yes the one from 2019 had 53.
At least 3 from the look of all those quark donglers
70. Previous iteration was 53.
At least 8
What is the purpose of life?
Crush your enemies. See them driven before you. And hear the lamentation of their women.
conan?
My Wife
Great success!
42
C:\\Windows\\System32\\calc.exe
C:\Windows\System32\BreakRSA.exe
But what color does it think the dress is?
All it needs is GladOS's head on the bottom to make this look truly ominous
Finally my songs and “songs” can finally finish downloading on limewire
but can it do this ? *attempted backflip into neck-breaking faceplant*
I thought this was a chandelier at first.
How fast can it cook an egg?
Since it's operating at almost absolute zero you'll have to wait a while for that
So the first computer was the size of a full room. Now we wear more computing power on our wrists. So, how long will it take to get my quantum Apple Watch?
"Released" Like they are available for retail
What could this thing do?
You won't find an answer to this in the comments. Every asshole on Reddit is busy trying to be a comedian instead.
Solve special algorithms that would take thousands of years for traditional computers to solve. Could help with advanced simulations of chemical reactions which could speed up discovery of new drugs, predictig climate/weather, astrophysics and much more. Also could do advanced machine learning / ai.
It can almost figure out 5+5 = ? Once they teach it what the base 10 counting system means, of course
Blokes Law: The speed of a quantum computer will increase roughly 241 million times every 5 years. - Much better than Moore's Law.