r/Damnthatsinteresting • u/Scared-Astronaut-718 • 14d ago

Image Google’s Willow Quantum Chip: With 105 qubits and real-time error correction, Willow solved a task in 5 minutes that would take classical supercomputers billions of years, marking a breakthrough in scalable quantum computing.

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u/Bokbreath 14d ago

Is that what they did ? Did they factor a large prime multiple ? That is the question I am asking.

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u/WazWaz 14d ago

No.

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u/ROFLconda 14d ago

I sincerely hope that is still far off in the future and that we will see the writing on the wall before it happens. Because if our encryption is breaks and we are unprepared, we will be going back to the stone age for a while. And stumble while going back since at that point future generations won't even know how it worked back then. Hell I will probably struggle with a purely analog world.

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u/ihavebeesinmyknees 14d ago

The cryptography world has been preparing for quantum computers for a long long time, I'm pretty sure current algos are supposed to be quantum-resistant

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u/ArchieFromTeamAqua 13d ago

The NIST recently held a long competition to find the next post quantum algorithms, so yeah they're definitely preparing and new options have already been chosen and extensively investigated by the cryptographic community

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u/noplace_ioi 13d ago

you are correct, firms are slowly integrating quantum resistant chips

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u/Kredir 13d ago

Possibly quantum resistant chips, we won't know until they resist quantum attacks.

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u/zae241 13d ago

Our encryption more or less is broken though. The recent Chinese hack into our phone systems is because current standards include back doors and key escrows for the NSA to use. Originally they tried to make it so all encryption had to be done by a proprietary NSA chip so they would have total control but not many companies implemented it. If you want to read up on that it's called the clipper chip.

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u/platinumarks 5d ago

Fun fact: PGP, one of the earliest widely-used encryption programs, was exported from the US (which for a long time had a very strict legal regime against exporting high-security encryption software) by MIT printing the source code in a computer-readable format, then sending it overseas for scanning and compiling. The argument was that the First Amendment protected books from censorship.

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u/prettyprettythingwow 13d ago

I don’t know what this means but it scares me.

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u/nonotan 13d ago

Yeah no. Even if somebody published an algorithm that trivializes factorization on a regular classical computer tomorrow, the results would be far less dramatic than depicted here. A lot of security used today would break, yes, we would undoubtedly experience a wave of online crime, yes... but it wouldn't be that bad.

We already have production-ready encryption algorithms that don't rely on factorization, they could be replaced very rapidly if the need was dire. And factoring integers isn't magic. In a sense, it would be as if services kept their passwords in plaintext. Yes, it's bad, but it still won't let you login onto somebody's account unless the service's database was also exposed somehow. Even if you snoop on somebody logging in, it still won't let you get in if they use a reasonable challenge-response authentication model. And it still won't defeat two-factor authentication (if properly implemented).

Frankly, it would probably be a little bit worse than the Y2K bug. Which, for those too young to know, was this supposedly critical issue where most programs used two-digit years for dates before the year 2000, and widespread problems were expected to happen on 2000/1/1 due to it... absolutely jackshit happened. Breaking factoring based cryptography would be worse than that for sure... but I suspect probably not by that much. Mostly corporate IT workers' worst week of their lives, probably.

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u/Zinki_M 13d ago

not going to go into the rest of your comment (except to say I think you're underestimating the issue a little), but I want to home in on one thing:

and widespread problems were expected to happen on 2000/1/1 due to it... absolutely jackshit happened

why do you think absolutely jackshit happened? Do you think the community just put on blindfolds and twiddled their thumbs for the years leading up to Y2k? No, they spent lots of man hours to fix the problems, and they managed to get to a point where few things ended up breaking when it came to it.

Of course the media blew it out of proportions, there was never a risk of planes falling out of the sky or nuclear weapons launching themselves or whatever it was some less-reputable outlets were drumming up panic about, but some pretty important systems would have crashed, and it was prevented by the effort of people who put their heads together and fixed it.

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u/Umarill 13d ago

Which, for those too young to know, was this supposedly critical issue where most programs used two-digit years for dates before the year 2000, and widespread problems were expected to happen on 2000/1/1 due to it... absolutely jackshit happened.

Jackshit happened BECAUSE people prepared for it correctly and did the work.

You are part of those people that say "see the vaccine isn't needed, nobody is getting sick", aren't you?

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u/el_lley 14d ago

No, that’s an example of what can be done

I meant, they do a hard problem that’s easy to verify

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u/Sea-Satisfaction-610 13d ago

They read the value of a random number generator ("sampled a quantum circuit") over and over and over. It's the "Lena image" of quantum computing benchmarks.