this post was submitted on 04 Dec 2023
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[–] [email protected] 97 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Doom port pls, it's the law.

[–] [email protected] 72 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (4 children)

It can play doom and not play doom and be in various stages in between.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 11 months ago

You don't know if you're playing DOOM or WOOD until you look

[–] [email protected] 14 points 11 months ago

So statistically, on average, it just about plays Doom

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[–] [email protected] 95 points 11 months ago (2 children)

Wait, seriously? That's quite a jump from the last one I heard about.

Also: it's actually 1,121 qubits, even more impressive.

[–] [email protected] 40 points 11 months ago (3 children)

Isn't that also quite the small form factor? I still had the fridge sized copper monstrosities in mind when thinking of quantum computers

[–] [email protected] 57 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (3 children)

The attached picture says 133 qubits, so whatever that chip is (edit: Heron) it's not this thing.

IBM's post (that the article links) says:

Breaking the 1,000-qubit barrier with Condor

We have introduced IBM Condor, a 1,121 superconducting qubit quantum processor based on our cross-resonance gate technology. Condor pushes the limits of scale and yield in chip design with a 50% increase in qubit density, advances in qubit fabrication and laminate size, and includes over a mile of high-density cryogenic flex IO wiring within a single dilution refigerator.

So, it sounds like this is actually another fridge sized system.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 11 months ago

without a room temperature super conductor it will always be mostly cooling

[–] [email protected] 16 points 11 months ago

These qubits oscillate at microwave frequencies where the quantum information is stored. This means they need to be kept at a temperature where the microwave frequencies are completely devoid of any thermal noise. For microwave frequencies, this temperature is just a few millikelvins above absolute zero. Unfortunately, the temperature is required due to the fundamental nature of thermal noise due to temperature. Making the qubits out of room temperature superconductor would not solve the problem of the need to cool them down - unless they can be operated at higher frequency. There are quantum computers made using light/optical photons which do operate at room temperature because optical photons are at much higher frequency which has no thermal noise even at room temperature.

So, in conclusion, everytime you hear about superconducting qubit, they are always in a giant dilution refrigerator which gets bigger for more qubits as more connections from room temperature to qubits are needed.

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[–] [email protected] 19 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

I may be mistaken but the fridge sized copper monstrosity is the system that cool the quantum chip, so unless they miniaturized the cooling system it didn't change.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 11 months ago

Yeah, from my understanding, the chip itself is about the same size as a CPU chip.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 11 months ago

From what I remember the chip itself is pretty small, the size is all due to the cooling component.

Also keep in mind you've probably seen a development version of a quantum computer, where things are set up to be easily accessible to allow fixing and tinkering, without regard for size and optimization of space.

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[–] [email protected] 69 points 11 months ago (13 children)

This really is amazing to see. It feels like just year when we were discussing 1, 2, or 10 qubits.

Are there any/many current uses for these quantum computers?

[–] [email protected] 38 points 11 months ago (1 children)

breaking encryption algorithms

[–] [email protected] 30 points 11 months ago (1 children)

From what i heard, even 1,000 qubits isn't close to enough for modern passwords: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-00017-0

[–] [email protected] 26 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Paywall. Also, passwords and RSA are two different things.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Reversing hashing algos is what people mean when they talk about quantum computers cracking passwords / encryption, though.

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[–] [email protected] 31 points 11 months ago (16 children)

For now they are only being used for research purposes. For example, simulating Quantum effects in many atom physics and implementing error correction for future quantum computers. Any real applications still need some time but the pace of development is really quite something.

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 11 months ago (2 children)

Wasn't there a study that, with the current approach of evaluating an average to break it down to a few finite states, they might never be able to do for what they were developed; cracking passwords?

[–] [email protected] 24 points 11 months ago (2 children)

If by "cracking passwords" you mean reversing password hashes in a database, quantum computers aren't going to make a big dent there. The standard industry ways of doing that wouldn't be affected much by QCs. Breaking encryption, OTOH, with QCs is a concern, but also vastly overrated. It would take orders of magnitude more qubits to pull off than what's been worked on so far, and it may not be feasible to juggle that many qubits in a state of superposition.

I get really annoyed when people focus on breaking encryption with QCs. They are far more interesting and useful than that.

QC can make logistics more efficient. Have you ever seen photos of someone unpacking a giant Amazon box holding one little micro SD card? Amazon isn't dumb about these things, but our best methods of packing an entire truck is a guess. Packing algorithms would take too long to calculate how to perfectly pack it, so they come up with a solution that seems OK, and that leads to a few "filler" boxes that are unnecessarily large, among other inefficiencies. QC can solve this problem without taking the age of the universe to come up with a solution.

The order in which that truck delivers those packages can also be made more efficient with QC.

Then there's molecular simulations, which have the promise of making medications that are more effective, more likely to pass trials, and with fewer side effects. This can be done far faster on a QC.

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[–] [email protected] 62 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Damn. I never even finished Q-Bert 1. That game is hard! Are the sequels any better?

[–] [email protected] 24 points 11 months ago (1 children)

If you're on NES, turn the controller 45 degrees to the right. You're welcome.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Wasn’t the controller on the arcade a goddamn roll ball? Ugg

[–] [email protected] 27 points 11 months ago (5 children)

I see you're also in the Ibuprofen demographic.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 11 months ago

That hit home, hurts. Take it back.

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[–] [email protected] 21 points 11 months ago (2 children)
[–] [email protected] 8 points 11 months ago

Yes, but your 1650 is still the bottleneck

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 11 months ago (10 children)

"Now we hope to understand in better detail how these works and what to do with them"

[–] [email protected] 20 points 11 months ago

It's worth noting that the laser was much the same way. It was described early on as a solution in search of a problem, and lasers have had an incredible impact on technology.

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 11 months ago (3 children)

So, web encryption broken when? Now?

[–] [email protected] 22 points 11 months ago (2 children)

It takes about a billion qbits to break 2048bit encryption, so a while.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 11 months ago (1 children)

More importantly, how long until I can guarantee a 51% chance of solving every bitcoin block?

[–] [email protected] 7 points 11 months ago (5 children)

Hash functions are not known to be quantum vulnerable (i.e., there's no known quantum algorithm that provides an exponential speedup, best you can do is to use Grover's algorithm to slightly speed up the brute force search). So maybe never.

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 11 months ago

Great, so when operating systems have finally reached relative stability, the future holds crashes coming from the chipset.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 11 months ago (1 children)

How much is that in intel/AMD gigafloppers?

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 11 months ago (2 children)

You gotta coax the qubits, man.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 11 months ago (2 children)

1000? Wasn't that the threshold for breaking RSA crypto, or something?

[–] [email protected] 27 points 11 months ago (2 children)

I think it's closer to 20,000,000 and that is out the Noise Intermediate Scale Quantum computing, meaning modern chips would need to double or quadruple the number of qubits for error detection and error correction in order to run even basic algorithms. That's not to mention that they'd need to be super cooled for up to eight hours and stay in a super position without decoherence into their ground states before performing the Shor's Algorithm.

TL;DR: We need an improvement over 20000x and better tech to break RSA, but this is a good step forward!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shor%27s_algorithm

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