Ask Lemmy

Conspiracy time: Quantum computing may have already been solved and the US gov is keeping it secret so they can harvest encrypted data. Consider this blog post from Scott Aaronson (quantum computing expert / theoretical computer scientist / Schlumberger Centennial Chair of Computer Science at the University of Texas at Austin):

I’m going to close this post with a warning. When Frisch and Peierls wrote their now-famous memo in March 1940, estimating the mass of Uranium-235 that would be needed for a fission bomb, they didn’t publish it in a journal, but communicated the result through military channels only. As recently as February 1939, Frisch and Meitner had published in Nature their theoretical explanation of recent experiments, showing that the uranium nucleus could fission when bombarded by neutrons. But by 1940, Frisch and Peierls realized that the time for open publication of these matters had passed.

Similarly, at some point, the people doing detailed estimates of how many physical qubits and gates it’ll take to break actually deployed cryptosystems using Shor’s algorithm are going to stop publishing those estimates, if for no other reason than the risk of giving too much information to adversaries. Indeed, for all we know, that point may have been passed already. This is the clearest warning that I can offer in public right now about the urgency of migrating to post-quantum cryptosystems, a process that I’m grateful is already underway. (emphais my own)

Link for those interested. I'm not bringing this up because I'm trying to say that the US gov for sure has cracked quantum computers, but there's no denying that Scott's statements there do come off as a bit of a wink wink nudge nudge.