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https://gizmodo.com/google-says-its-achieved-quantum-supremacy-a-world-fir-1838299829
The Financial Times reports that they saw a Google publication claiming that the company's quantum processor can perform a calculation "in three minutes and 20 seconds that would take today's most advanced classical computer, known as Summit, approximately 10,000 years"—a demonstration of quantum supremacy. Google has not yet responded to a Gizmodo request for comment, and it has long been cagey about when and how it'd make the announcement.
We don't have many details as to what calculation the computer performed. But previous proposals essentially involve the quantum computer racing classical computer simulating a random quantum circuit. The achievement would not be a surprise—we've long known that Google has been testing a 72-qubit device called Bristlecone with which it hoped to achieve quantum supremacy. Financial Times reports that the supremacy experiment was instead performed with a 53-qubit processor codenamed Sycamore.
This would be a major early milestone when it comes to comparing these quantum devices against classical computers. But we're a long way off before quantum computers actually demonstrate quantum usefulness. That would require increasing the coherence time and introducing error correction schemes‚ those where multiple qubits are combined into one in order to ensure that the quantum computer outputs the answers it's supposed to output.
(Score: 2) by looorg on Saturday September 21 2019, @04:02PM (2 children)
Has it been verified by anyone or anything beyond itself? But even if NASA removed it (which somehow casts shade or doubt about the whole thing or the medias interpretation of it) lets just assume that it's true until told otherwise. What are the implications if this is now a real thing? Isn't more or less all classical computations now then dead? Encryption is borderline pointless since it would be a mere fraction of a second to break it -- if Google can build one then pretty much any nation can build one, any reasonably large organization can build one etc ...
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Saturday September 21 2019, @05:50PM (1 child)
Well, perhaps not a fraction of a second, but a lot less time. And it would still be a very expensive process.
So, no, encryption isn't *dead*, merely moribund. For just about everybody it's probably still pretty good for a couple of decades. But do you use on-line banking? That's got a lot more issues than just quantum breaking of encryption.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 22 2019, @02:22AM
Quantum computers don't break all kinds of encryption, although it does break the current widely-used ones. But there are many alternative approaches that are quantum-resistant. I wouldn't expect encryption to just stop working.
Mostly, I'd expect it to become possible to break present-day encryption in the future. So if some secrets are encrypted now, in five or ten years someone that has obtained a copy of the encrypted data might be able to decrypt it. But there will be new algorithms available by then to protect routine transactions.