Strilanc

5 ms·

1.
by Strilanc 5d ago
That's only one of mathematics' many purposes.
2.
by Strilanc 5d ago
This letter is complaining that human understanding has been crucial to advancing of mathematics, and AI companies are not bothering with it. But the promise (and horror) of AI mathematics is that, if it succeeds, human understanding become
3.
by Strilanc 10d ago
Currently the two qubit gate error rate is listed as ~2.7e-3 (see https://quantum.cloud.ibm.com/computers?system=ibm_phoenix but note it will vary from day to day). That implies you can expect ~400 entangling gates before e
4.
by Strilanc 12d ago
In order for a person to observe themselves working at Anthropic (or any other AI company), that person must be actively failing to internalize the risks of the work they are doing. This "Anthropic principle" neatly explains why O
5.
by Strilanc 4mo ago
That is not true. A spanning tree of physical links is sufficient to make a network where anyone can talk to anyone else. The key ingredient here is entanglement swapping [1]. Entanglement between routers A and B can be merged with entangle
6.
by Strilanc 4mo ago
The recommendation is to not use QKD. This is the correct recommendation. QKD solves key agreement if you have an authenticated line . But authentication is the harder more crucial problem. Here's an interesting related aside: the lik
7.
by Strilanc 5mo ago
The dominant cost in Shor's algorithm is the elliptic curve point addition subroutine. That subroutine can be implemented using reversible classical gates. For that kind of implementation, approximate correctness can be verified by fuz
8.
by Strilanc 5mo ago
This was exactly the premise of my sigbovik April Fool's paper in 2025 [1]: for small numbers, Shor's algorithm succeeds quickly when fed random samples. And when your circuit is too long (given the error rate of the quantum compu
9.
by Strilanc 5mo ago
Good post. Entirely correct, and well known amongst quantum researchers, but under appreciated in general. Grover attacks are very blatantly impractical. When someone describes Grover-type attacks in the same breath as Shor-type attacks, wi
10.
by Strilanc 5mo ago
> That graph suggests that even with the best error correction in the graph, it is impossible to factor RSA-4 with less then 10^4 qubits. Which seems very odd. It's because the plot is assuming the use of error correction even for
11.
by Strilanc 6mo ago
The newest transaction mechanism (taproot; P2TR) exposes the public key of the receiver as part of the transaction. If it becomes more commonly used, the supply of bitcoins with exposed public keys would start going up again. See figure 5 o
12.
by Strilanc 6mo ago
The DoS attack in this scenario is someone just submitting reasonable-looking but ultimately bad precommitments as fast as possible. The intuition is that precommitments must be hard to validate because, if there was an easy validation mech
13.
by Strilanc 6mo ago
Yes, that would be a concern. You could require a proof of work to submit a precommitment, so that DoSing was at least expensive to do. You could have some sort of deposit mechanism, where a precommitment would lock down 0.1 bitcoins (from
14.
by Strilanc 6mo ago
Caution: that 10M estimate assumes gate error rates 10x lower than the ones assumed in the papers from TFA.
15.
by Strilanc 6mo ago
You are assuming that progress on factoring will be smooth, but this is unlikely to be true. The scaling challenges of quantum computers are very front-loaded. I know this sounds crazy, but there is a sense in which the step from 15 to 21 i
16.
by Strilanc 6mo ago
This is for rescue, not for payment. Once you've moved the coins to quantum-secure wallet, the delay would no longer be needed. ...probably some people would be very inconvenienced by this. But not as inconvenienced as having the coins
17.
by Strilanc 6mo ago
The best proposal I have heard for rescuing P2SH wallets after cryptographically relevant quantum computers exist is to require vulnerable wallets to precommit to transactions a day ahead of time. The precommitment doesn't reveal the p
18.
Quantum computing bombshells that are not April Fools(scottaaronson.blog)
265 points by Strilanc 6mo ago|109 comments
19.
by Strilanc 6mo ago
> [0.1% gate error rate] is still wildly out of reach This is false. When Fowler et al assumed 0.1% gate error rates would be reached for his estimates in 2012 [0], that was ostentatious. Now it's frankly a bit overly conservative
20.
by Strilanc 6mo ago
Minor update: Dominik condensed the blog posts into a pre-print: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.09901
21.
by Strilanc 6mo ago
That slide deck is complaining that correct work on quantum attacks should be seen as negligible priority or as distractions. TFA is complaining that JVG isn't even correct . They are pretty different concerns. To be clear, I think th
22.
by Strilanc 6mo ago
No, 15 is unique in that all multiplications by a known constant coprime to 15 correspond to bit rotations and/or bit flips. For 2047 that only occurs for a teeny tiny fraction of the selectable multipliers. Shor's algorithm spe
23.
by Strilanc 6mo ago
What do you mean? The original 2019 supremacy experiment was eventually simulated, as better classical methods were found, but the followups are still holding strong (for example [4] and [5]). There was recently a series of blog posts by D
24.
by Strilanc 6mo ago
What reviewers? It's not a peer reviewed article.
25.
by Strilanc 6mo ago
Agree. Scott is exactly correct when he just straight calls it crap. It's inaccurate to say it wins on small numbers because on small numbers you would use classical computers. By the time you get to numbers that take more than a minut
26.
by Strilanc 6mo ago
The very first demonstration of factoring 15 with a quantum computer, back in 2001, used a valid modular exponentiation circuit [1]. The trickiest part of the circuit is they compile conditional multiplication by 4 (mod 15) into two control
27.
by Strilanc 7mo ago
For each chick they do 24 trials divided into 4 blocks with retraining on the ambiguous shape and actual rewards after each block. During the actual tests they didn't give rewards. In figure 1 they show the data bucketed by trial index
28.
by Strilanc 8mo ago
Wasn't this study immediately debunked due to bad statistical methods? See https://zenodo.org/records/18002186 > Using simple simulations,we show that this pattern arises naturally from collider bias when sele
29.
Quantum Computing in the Second Quantum Century [video](youtube.com)
1 points by Strilanc 8mo ago|0 comments
30.
by Strilanc 8mo ago
> By late 2024 the biggest numbers that had been factored by an actual digital quantum computer had 35 bits (citing https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.14397v1 ) This is incorrect. The cited reference says "N <= 35

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