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Supercomputer makes calculations in blink of an eye that take rivals 47 years
(www.telegraph.co.uk)
this post was submitted on 08 Jul 2023
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Technology
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It's a 70-qubit quantum computer. It doesn't have enough memory to break even rudimentary 128-bit encryption.
The algorithm that it executed was also not Shor's algorithm (the one that could potentially break encryption). The benchmark used is called random circuit sampling, which is just doing a bunch of random quantum operations between pairs of qubits and then reading the output. It's one of the fastest quantum speedups of any known algorithm.
“128-bit” usually refers to symmetric encryption, which is not broken by Shor's algorithm. 4096-bit RSA is what Shor's algorithm needs to break, and it's going to take a lot more than 70 qubits to do that. Like, two orders of magnitude more.