A team of Harvard scientists working on a project funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has announced a significant breakthrough in the field of quantum computing.
Researchers working with the Optimization with Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (ONISQ) program say they have created the world’s first quantum circuit using logical quantum bits (qubits). The innovation marks a significant stride towards fault-tolerant quantum computing, promising to revolutionize the design of quantum computer processors.
At a superficial level, I can understand what is being said and what promises such breakthrough carries.
But when I stop and think for a moment on what I truly read I’m left feeling incredibly stupid.
I know some of those words… the short ones.
I didn’t know DARPA was a thing since it made the internet
So, can it crack public keys?
Almost certainly not yet. But sooner than I’d like. There’s a ton of encrypted comms that have been vacuumed up by state and private actors who are just waiting for quantum computers to get good enough to crack them.
And if it can, are there any cipher suites that are quantom-proof?
maybe real short ones : )
smells like the groundwork for much more significant progress in the future to me. Assuming i read that correctly, and that the article isn’t just wrong.
Let’s come back to all of this when all those “quantum breakthroughs” manage to compute anything worthwhile that is not a quantum computer benchmark, but solves a real world problem.
