[kirrent]

Man, some real "Cynicism is the intellectual cripple's substitute for intelligence" energy here. Seems unnecessary given what I read of Gutmann's history.

I get it must be annoying to be someone working in cryptography and always be hearing about QC when there are endless security issues today. It must be tiring to have all these breathless pop-science articles about the quantum future, startups claiming ridiculous timelines to raise money on hype, and business seminars where consultants claim you'll need to be prepared for the quantum revolution changing how business works. I feel the same way.

But you shouldn't let that drive you so far in the opposite direction that you're extrapolating fun small quantum factoring experiments from a decade ago to factoring 1024 bit keys in the year 4000. Or say things like 'This makes the highly optimistic assumption that quantum physics experiments scale linearly... the evidence we have, shown by the lack of progress so far, is that this is not the case'. If we get fault tolerant QC of course it scales linearly and it seems embarrassing as a computer scientist to not understand the difference between constant and asymptote. "Actually, quantum computers are so new and untested that they really qualify as physics experiments"... yeah? And?

None of this is to say that fault-tolerant highly scalable QC implementing Shor's algorithm is just around the corner, I truly believe it's not. But the world of QC is making really interesting advances running some of the coolest experiments around and I find this superior Hossenfelder-like cynicism in the face of real science making real progress so so tiring.

[oh_my_goodness]

It's strange to see so many negative responses that start with vague emotional language. It's almost as if a lot of critics didn't read the presentation. Or maybe they think the rest of us didn't read it.

[kirrent]

I read the whole presentation. The physics experiment criticism Guttman makes that I referred to is at page 16/30. Nothing after that engages with QC to the extent that the first half of the presentation did, so I didn't refer to later parts.

[fxwin]

Is it really that strange when the slides themselves pretty emotionally charged?

[oh_my_goodness]

Good question. Yes it is strange, because the information on the slides is mainly numerical. For example the integers "15" and "21" and the years "2002" and "2012" don't pack much of an emotional charge for me. I suspect they wouldn't for most people.

[fxwin]

You missed the number 15360 on p12, which is mostly what i was referring to.

[pclmulqdq]

One major point of the presentation here is that it's not making real progress. People are still publishing papers, but they have done nothing with an effect outside their little community. It's been in roughly the same state for the last 10 years. For a minimum of 30 years, there have been promises of amazing things coming in the next decade in QC. After how many decades should those predictions lose credibility?

There is real opportunity cost to doing this stuff, and real money getting sucked up by these grifters that could be spent on real problems. There are real PhD students getting sucked down this rabbit hole instead of doing something that actually does make progress. There is a real cost to screwing around and making promises of "next decade."

[wasabi991011]

> One major point of the presentation here is that it's not making real progress.

How are you measuring "real progress"?

> People are still publishing papers, but they have done nothing with an effect outside their little community.

Having an effect outside the research community is essentially a Heaviside function. Before the field is mature enough, there is no effect outside, but once the field is mature enough, there is an effect outside. Makes it hard to judge if there is any progress or not.

[pclmulqdq]

The field has had 40 years of maturing. Experimentation on QC started in the 1980's. At what point are we going to be factoring numbers or (more realistically) simulating chemical interactions?

Real progress in this field is very easy to measure. It's based on number of effective qbits of computation. That is just a metric where QC is failing to deliver so badly that everyone in the field wants to deny its existence.

Unfortunately, the level of investment in QC is very much outsized compared to the level of progress. These things should rise at the same time. More promising areas of science can get the investment that is otherwise being sucked into QC.

> Having an effect outside the research community is essentially a Heaviside function.

This is something that people like to say but is never true. Impact on the outside world for new technologies is almost always a sigmoid function, not a heavyside function. You should see some residual beneficial effects at the leading edge if you have something real.

[fxwin]

> Real progress in this field is very easy to measure. It's based on number of effective qbits of computation.

Plenty more progress measures (decoherence, gate fidelity/error rates) to use that we have made significant progress in over the last 10 years.

[kirrent]

I agree! People who predicted QC soon over the last few decades should lose credibility. They were wrong and they were wrong for no good reason. There is a real opportunity cost to focusing on the wrong thing. There are definitely grifters in the space. Responsible QC researchers should call it out (e.g. Scott Aaronson).

But it doesn't necessarily follow that you can dismiss the actual underlying field. Within the last five years alone we've gone from the quantum supremacy experiment to multiple groups using multiple technologies to claim QEC code implementations with improved error rates over the underlying qubits. People don't have to be interested in these results, they are rather niche (a little community as you put it), but you shouldn't be uninterested and then write a presentation titled 'Why Quantum Cryptanalysis is Bollocks'.

[pclmulqdq]

Well, when the little community circles the wagons around the grifters instead of excising them, the rest of us get to ask questions about that community. The cold fusion community did the same thing for several decades, too.

And by the way, about 0.01% of the grifters in the QC space are getting called out right now.

[impossiblefork]

Yes, but it can also be like EUV.

Not working for years upon years, and suddenly it works, and if it does it can be a huge problem. I don't know if I trust PQC though, but that only means that more research on it is needed.