Is it akin to the revolutionary code-breaking system from Digital Fortress called TRANSLTR?
I hope it won’t.
Alternate headline: Supercomputer makes specially tailored, useless calculations in blink of an eye that would take classical computer rivals 47 years if they tried it for some strange reason
Ah, the Telegraph.
It’s not a good title, but it is an interesting result. A synthetic benchmark is useful in knowing the theoretical maximum speedup that is possible, and whether it is worth exploring further.
It’s really not, though. We know how quantum computation works. We don’t know what it’s capable of in full, but that discussion will happen on proverbial blackboards, not chips.
What this is is a marketing stunt.
From the article:
A paper from researchers at Google published online claims that the company’s latest technology is “beyond the capabilities of existing classical supercomputers”.
Where is the paper? That link points to another news from The Telegraph about oil prices… WTF?
Based on just the 70 qubits mentioned in the article, and that running Shor’s algorithm on RSA 2048 would require north of 4096 “perfect qubits”, or about a couple dozen million “physical qubits”… it doesn’t sound like they’ve done much.
Quantum computing is mostly a hoax. At least how it is presented to investors and the public. Quantum Computers will maybe be capable of solving a very small set of problems much more efficiently than regular computers, most of these problems aren’t of any parctical importance. It is a massive (financial) bubble that is going to burst soon.
“Hoax” makes it sound like the involved scientists aren’t shouting this from the damn rooftops.
The economically important problems they beat are breaking encryption (actually counterproductive) and simulating other quantum systems (like reacting molecules, which could be useful). There’s other neat tricks they can do but they’re underwhelming to anybody who’s not a technical person, and it’s possible we’ll discover more substantially impactful algorithms but it’s hard so don’t hold your breath.
most of these problems aren’t of any parctical importance.
Well sure, but one of them is extremely important. Factoring integers rapidly is very useful, even if it completely destroys one of the most important encryption algorithms.
Not that this computer does, or could. RSA is still safe.
Yes, but there are already algorithms which can replace it.
They can replace them going forward. A major issue is that many governments (and likely other malicious actors) have been hoarding encrypted communication in hopes of accessing it once sufficiently big quantum computer emerges.
I am wondering why we are waiting, if it’s an inevitability
Because security is still a big deal. There are post quantum algorithms, but there are similar post quantum algorithms that have been proven to be flawed. It’s important to allow technology like this to mature prior to adoption.
That’s a bit of a broad strike no? That’s like saying the invention of the modern computing is mostly a “hoax”, all they are capable of doing is adding numbers together faster than a human.
We already know we can transform certain problems that are computationally expensive to be solved by quantum computers. I’m sure more Algorithms can be developed to take advantage of that in the future as well.
