News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Looking at some claims that quantum computers won't work by upofadown on Saturday January 18, 2025 @06:46PM (#42752370)
>Everything disintegrates for physical error rates around 1% or above

Last I heard we were 1-2 orders of magnitude away from the error correction break even point for noise performance; that point where it would take an infinite number of noisy qubits to break 2048 bit RSA. So does this mean that we are still at an error rate of something like 10%?

Re:Looking at some claims that quantum computers won't work by wzeng on Saturday January 18, 2025 @07:10PM (#42752504)
Several approaches are better than the break even point today, including the Google demonstration of error correction working to reduce logical errors: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-08449-y

There’s more citations to gate fidelity progress here: https://metriq.info/Task/38

Re:Looking at some claims that quantum computers won't work by upofadown on Saturday January 18, 2025 @07:27PM (#42752581)
Did the Google experiment actually hit break even? I got that it had only demonstrated that surface codes did what they were predicted to do. Is it really only a matter of creating more hardware at this point?
Re:Looking at some claims that quantum computers won't work by Strilanc on Saturday January 18, 2025 @07:56PM (#42752720)
Yes it exceeded break even, but no you can't just copy paste hardware yet. For example, some kind of chip-to-chip coupling is needed since chips can't be arbitrarily large.