Google claims 'quantum supremacy' for computer

Your encryption is no longer safe with the authorities. Something that
took 10,000 years can now be processed in 200 seconds.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-50154993


--
With over 1,000,000 million devices now running Windows 10, customer
satisfaction is higher than any previous version of windows.

On Wed, 23 Oct 2019 21:05:37 +0100, ? Good Guy ?
wrote:



Your encryption is no longer safe with the authorities. Something that
took 10,000 years can now be processed in 200 seconds.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-50154993

Well, we'll just have to bury our drives in the back yard.

In article ,
says...

Your encryption is no longer safe with the authorities. Something that
took 10,000 years can now be processed in 200 seconds.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-50154993

That's a little premature.

There are good IEEE articles recently about how all
the experts are working to develop crypto
algorithms that q-computers won't be good at breaking.
Principles of such encryption codes are well-understood.
Even the quantum folks agree. It's too soon to panic.

On 10/23/2019 9:38 PM, Peter Jason wrote:
On Wed, 23 Oct 2019 21:05:37 +0100, ? Good Guy ?
wrote:



Your encryption is no longer safe with the authorities. Something that
took 10,000 years can now be processed in 200 seconds.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-50154993

Well, we'll just have to bury our drives in the back yard.

As an arts man, I have only the vaguest idea even about quantum physics.
Can someone explain this?

😵 Good Guy 😵 wrote:

Google claims 'quantum supremacy' for computer

That was news a month ago.

https://fortune.com/2019/09/20/google-claims-quantum-supremacy/
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2217347-google-claims-it-has-finally-reached-quantum-supremacy/


With over 1,000,000 million devices now running Windows 10

There are only about 1,000 million (1,000,000,000) devices running Windows
10, not the 1,000,000 million (1,000,000,000,000) which 😵 Good Guy 😵
says there are. 😵 Good Guy 😵 is dreaming about 130 Windows 10 devices
for each and every man woman and child on earth.

KenW wrote:

Good Guy is kill filed by most people, why do you keep posting
about him? Are you a troll ?

+1

--
XS11E, Killing all posts from Google Groups
The Usenet Improvement Project:
http://twovoyagers.com/improve-usenet.org/

KenW wrote:
Good Guy is kill filed by most people, why do you keep posting about
him? Are you a troll ?

From a news.software.readers post:

"In Agent 6.0, killfiling "JohnDoe" and choosing as Action "Ignore
Thread" means (after setting my View to 'not ignored') I see nothing of
his posts and nothing of those who respond to him."

IOW, if you follow this advice, you don't have to see these posts
anymore.

[...]

On 10/24/2019 11:43 AM, Frank Slootweg wrote:
KenW wrote:
Good Guy is kill filed by most people, why do you keep posting about
him? Are you a troll ?

From a news.software.readers post:

"In Agent 6.0, killfiling "JohnDoe" and choosing as Action "Ignore
Thread" means (after setting my View to 'not ignored') I see nothing of
his posts and nothing of those who respond to him."

IOW, if you follow this advice, you don't have to see these posts
anymore.


Yes, but you also won't see any other posts in the thread--posts that
are not replies to him.

On 24/10/2019 18:01, KenW wrote:
Good Guy is kill filed by most people, why do you keep posting about
him? Are you a troll ?


Probably they are the same nym-shifters; I see posts from DavidB,
Diesel, Good Guy, Bad Guy, Better Guys and others and they all appear to
be from the same person.

They find any old news on the web and spam these newsgroups. Mozilla
have a better way of moderating their newsgroups. We don't see many
from GG and his other nyms.

On Thu, 24 Oct 2019 08:03:40 +0100, Martin Edwards
wrote:

On 10/23/2019 9:38 PM, Peter Jason wrote:
On Wed, 23 Oct 2019 21:05:37 +0100, ? Good Guy ?
wrote:



Your encryption is no longer safe with the authorities. Something that
took 10,000 years can now be processed in 200 seconds.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-50154993

Well, we'll just have to bury our drives in the back yard.

As an arts man, I have only the vaguest idea even about quantum physics.
Can someone explain this?

Some fanciful physics theory about a cat in and out of a box.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schr%C3%B6dinger%27s_cat

On 10/24/2019 11:35 PM, Peter Jason wrote:
On Thu, 24 Oct 2019 08:03:40 +0100, Martin Edwards
wrote:

On 10/23/2019 9:38 PM, Peter Jason wrote:
On Wed, 23 Oct 2019 21:05:37 +0100, ? Good Guy ?
wrote:



Your encryption is no longer safe with the authorities. Something that
took 10,000 years can now be processed in 200 seconds.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-50154993

Well, we'll just have to bury our drives in the back yard.

As an arts man, I have only the vaguest idea even about quantum physics.
Can someone explain this?

Some fanciful physics theory about a cat in and out of a box.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schr%C3%B6dinger%27s_cat

That's one I have never got. For me the cat is in an actual position
with or without there being an observer. As for the quantum thing,
there is what I think is a pretty good explanation, but I still do not
get it. Thanks for the post anyway.

On Thu, 24 Oct 2019 11:53:17 -0700, Ken Blake wrote:
On 10/24/2019 11:43 AM, Frank Slootweg wrote:
KenW wrote:
Good Guy is kill filed by most people, why do you keep posting about
him? Are you a troll ?

From a news.software.readers post:

"In Agent 6.0, killfiling "JohnDoe" and choosing as Action "Ignore
Thread" means (after setting my View to 'not ignored') I see nothing of
his posts and nothing of those who respond to him."

IOW, if you follow this advice, you don't have to see these posts
anymore.


Yes, but you also won't see any other posts in the thread--posts that
are not replies to him.

That is not correct. See screen-shot: https://i.imgur.com/ILGYnK2.png

In Agent 4.0 and later, the "Ignore" filter will only ignore the subthread
started by "JohnDoe". That is, it will only ignore "JohnDoe", replies to
"JohnDoe", replies to replies to "JohnDoe", and so on.


--
Kind regards
Ralph

Martin Edwards wrote:
On 10/24/2019 11:35 PM, Peter Jason wrote:
On Thu, 24 Oct 2019 08:03:40 +0100, Martin Edwards
wrote:

On 10/23/2019 9:38 PM, Peter Jason wrote:
On Wed, 23 Oct 2019 21:05:37 +0100, ? Good Guy ?
wrote:



Your encryption is no longer safe with the authorities. Something
that
took 10,000 years can now be processed in 200 seconds.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-50154993

Well, we'll just have to bury our drives in the back yard.

As an arts man, I have only the vaguest idea even about quantum physics.
Can someone explain this?

Some fanciful physics theory about a cat in and out of a box.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schr%C3%B6dinger%27s_cat

That's one I have never got. For me the cat is in an actual position
with or without there being an observer. As for the quantum thing,
there is what I think is a pretty good explanation, but I still do not
get it. Thanks for the post anyway.

Quantum computing is limited to problems which "happen
to align with the interpretation that comes out of the
hardware". Quantum computing is not an "abacus". You
can't do payroll on it. In some ways, it almost resembles
an analog computer, in the sense that it has "measurement devices"
on the outputs.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2019...uting-efforts/

A physicist at Ars, it took him months to think up a "sample problem"
to run on a DWave. He chose to model a Bragg diffraction grating, and
got an output that kinda looks like what should come out. And he noticed
that the state the machine was in, was "similar" to how lighting effects
come through the grating.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2019...tum-computing/

They have more articles, but I don't expect this will lead to
an answer for you any faster.

https://arstechnica.com/tag/quantum-computing/

Wikipedia, about all you'll get out of this, is the notion there's
more than one kind of quantum hardware, and what they're working
on now for a particular type, is "error correction". The machines
need to stay coherent long enough to run a problem to completion,
or allow the error correction to take place. They're refrigerated,
to help stabilize them and encourage coherence.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_computing

And this is the topic which is the "threat" to cryptography.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shor's_algorithm

The best part of the Shor's algorithm article is this dialog box...

"This section may be too technical for most readers to understand.
Please help improve it to make it understandable to non-experts,
without removing the technical details. (February 2014)"

The intro section of the article is OK. But once you hit the
"Quantum subroutine" figure, where the couplings between Qubits
are shown, it rapidly goes downhill from there.

From this we learn "writing a program for a quantum computer is
a metric bitch" :-) Notice how you need a PhD in math ? Nobody
in payroll will ever figure this out.

*******

There are other topics in computing, that are out in lala land
like this too. This isn't the only thing that's hard to understand.

Paul

Michael wrote:
On 24/10/2019 18:01, KenW wrote:
Good Guy is kill filed by most people, why do you keep posting about
him? Are you a troll ?

Probably they are the same nym-shifters; I see posts from DavidB,
Diesel, Good Guy, Bad Guy, Better Guys and others and they all appear to
be from the same person.

You couldn't be more wrong!

Yes, there probably are several 'Guy'-nyms of the same 'anti'-GG
person. That's irony/sarcasm for you.

But DavidB, Diesel, Good Guy and the 'anti'-GG person are all seperate
persons.

They find any old news on the web and spam these newsgroups. Mozilla
have a better way of moderating their newsgroups. We don't see many
from GG and his other nyms.

On Fri, 25 Oct 2019 07:50:29 +0100, Martin Edwards
wrote:

On 10/24/2019 11:35 PM, Peter Jason wrote:
On Thu, 24 Oct 2019 08:03:40 +0100, Martin Edwards
wrote:

On 10/23/2019 9:38 PM, Peter Jason wrote:
On Wed, 23 Oct 2019 21:05:37 +0100, ? Good Guy ?
wrote:



Your encryption is no longer safe with the authorities. Something that
took 10,000 years can now be processed in 200 seconds.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-50154993

Well, we'll just have to bury our drives in the back yard.

As an arts man, I have only the vaguest idea even about quantum physics.
Can someone explain this?

Some fanciful physics theory about a cat in and out of a box.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schr%C3%B6dinger%27s_cat

That's one I have never got. For me the cat is in an actual position
with or without there being an observer.

I have seen a cat think and plan then execute the plan. Cats *are*
observers. They chose the wrong lifeform. They would have been better
selecting something brainless, such as a politician, priest or TV News
reader.

As for the quantum thing,
there is what I think is a pretty good explanation, but I still do not
get it.

"Quantum" means "count". It alludes to how the world comes in
discrete bits, very small ones. Because of this, and other
complexities arising therefrom, odd stuff *seems* to happen on the
atomic, sub-atomic and generally teentsy levels.

The thought experiment about the cat is supposed to illustrate how
quantum level events, a radioactive atom either decaying or not and
either being detected or not by a cat-killer device, *should* have
observable consequences in the real, macro-scopic, man-sized planet.

Of course, modern tech shows us this about a million times per day.
Companies make trillions of money units out of quantum and even
something like GPS depends on it (and Relativity, too). But the cat
thing is meant to show us that quantum events are loose and
undetermined until we look at them. That we *can't* know whether the
cat needs feeding or not until we look at it. This leads us to think
that we can't know *anything* for sure until we look at the result,
that shooting a guy only works if we watch and falling off of a tall
building only hurts us if we're either watched or awake. [So, Arny The
Terminator can't kill Sarah because he's a machine and machines are
not "observers". This is why there are fifty thousand movies in the
franchise. She quantums her way out of every danger. See also the
WikiP article on Quantum Immortality.]

And all of this is, according to large-scale, Newtonian style
classical physics, utter ****e. As you intuit, because your intuition
is based on big-world physics, according to "real world physics",
[assuming such a thing was even theoretically valid] the atom either
falls apart or it does not. The decay product either is or is not
detected and the cat is or is not starting to get hungry. [Note, that
last is irony as *all* cats are *always* starting to get hungry. Just
ask any random cat for confirmation. Offer prawns.]

Quantum works. We know this and rely on it. Whether it spills over to
not killing dead cats is moot. Quantum computing is merely using more
than one "dead-alive cat in a box" to store the numbers. Unlike the
classical computers, such as the one you use to Usenet, quantum boxes
don't have huge, great cells full of electrons or magnetic domains to
store data, they do it in "qubits", allegedly two-ish particles that
can be in a "zero", "one" or "who knows" state. [Personally, I don't
think they'll be commercially viable and consumer available until the
also obtain a "who gives a flying ****" state, but I have a rather odd
view of what the cosmos considers to be physics.]

Using the "who knows" state, the state where the cat would be both
hungry and not, it is "possible" to look at the results of a
computation that would give all three (maybe more) answers all at the
same time. That would seem to double the speed of, for example,
testing chess moves for viability or fingerprints for matches but it
is far, far better than this as *LOTS* of qubits can be used all at
once. This makes finding factors for large numbers *LOTS* and *LOTS*
faster, or so the theory goes. [In reality, the tech isn't good enough
to use individual atom pairs or such in vast swarms. Not yet. The
article seems to suggest that the geniuses are approaching this. The
question of utility in human-friendly situations is rather problematic
as very low temperatures and bloody huge machines seem to be required.
These sorts of "oh, my god, a computer able to count to five would be
bigger than London" problems do tend to be resolved after a few
tries.]

Quantum computing is just lots of cats in lots of boxes that we don't
look at until the very final number is crunched so lots of additions,
subtractions, ANDs, NANDs, XORs and other goodies can all be run very,
very fast. Maybe even simultaneously. Simultaneity is one of the
goals.

One of the iffynesses about qubit computers is that you seem to be
able to get the right answer without doing *anything* as the final
state of the machine *could* be forced to be the initial one if you
bent coincidence a lot. That makes Borg heads explode and would reduce
the cost of CPU-intensive computing enormously, were it not complete
nonsense.




Incidentally, the cat thing was tried. When they ran the experiment
there were two results: in the first run, the cat was neither dead nor
alive but simply missing.

In the second run, the cat had vanished and left in its place a
deeply confused dog.

Thanks for the post anyway.

It's nice when people do that.

Note, all above "explanations" are overly simplistic, have few if any
numbers and don't reflect any reality or aspect thereof except by some
incredibly unlikely coincidence. No cosmoses were harmed in the
construction of the above notions and any cats were eventually fed,
despite them protesting otherwise.

J.