IBM releases first-ever 1,000-qubit quantum chip

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

So statistically, on average, it just about plays Doom

Plays 0.01% of doom and the rest is noise

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.

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.

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.

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

Currently, there is basically only one real world application we really know: Factoring numbers into prime factors. And we can't know for sure whether there will be more even.

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.

I dont think that the only use of Quantum computers is password cracking, rather that one of the types of work loads thats much easier on a quantum computer.

Man, if something like this could make crypto obsolete, I would laugh like a mf.

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

Post quantum cryptography is under development and is slowly being introduced in order to evaluate it / prevent store-and-decrypt-later attacks... But this is generally in more niche applications. SSH recently adopted post-quantum cryptography for key exchange, but it uses a hybrid approach with traditional cryptography in case the post-quantum stuff proves to be not as strong as we think... Signal is experimenting with post-quantum stuff as well. As far as I know, though, post-quantum cryptograhy hasn't seen wide deployment, and I don't think any of it is used with HTTPS yet (certainly not commonly, anyway). Depending on what you care about this could be a problem. If you just care that nobody else can authenticate as you, then yeah, once everything is moved over to post-quantum stuff you can just change all your passwords and hopefully you'll be good... If you care that the data is private then this is a big problem, and in theory somebody could scrape all of the messages you've sent and the contents of everything that you've done on the web (probably government agencies and not normal people, but maybe this information later gets leaked to the public too). This could also be a problem for authentication, for instance if you've ever logged into your bank account you've probably seen your routing numbers which somebody could take and use to transfer money, in theory.

It's also worth noting that, as far as I know, we don't actually know for certain that the post-quantum cryptography we've developed is secure. I think all we know is that it isn't vulnerable to Shor's algorithm, but there could be other exploits we don't know about. This is of course also true for all of the cryptography we use today too. We don't actually know how hard factoring into prime numbers is, for instance, but these algorithms have been in use for a long time and have been under a lot of scrutiny so we have more confidence in them.

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

IIRC, those several million qubit computers out there right now aren't really comparable, either. They're using a ton of qubits, expecting a lot of them to fall out of superposition, but hoping they have enough to get a useful result. IBM's approach is to try to get the most out of every qubit. Either approach is valid, but IBM's 1000 qubits can't be directly compared to millions of qubits used elsewhere.

So, basically, we're still in the ENIAC stage of quantum computers. They're cool and all, can do some awesome stuff, but are no where near the potential they could be.

Coax