In a white paper written on the same day as the Caltech paper, Gidney and his colleagues announced that they had developed a new method for breaking ECC that was at least 10 times more efficient than previous methods. They estimate that most cryptocurrencies would provide seconds to a machine with less than 500,000 qubits.
Jeff Thompson, a physicist at Princeton University and CEO of the neutral atom startup Logiqal, Jeff Thompson, “this tenfold reduction in the time cost of breaking the elliptic curve code.”
Google’s precise implementation of Shor’s algorithm and Caltech’s new protocol suggest that small computers will be able to do much more than many researchers realized. They also mark a shift in which researchers are beginning to hide important information that competitors or bad actors might find useful. For the first time, Google described their work using “zero knowledge proof,” a method of revealing that a program works without revealing exactly how it works.
Robert Huang used a large model language to create an efficient qLDPC code to create a single qubit from just four atoms.
Due to the rapid development of computing, physicists say that adapting RSA and ECC for new cryptographic purposes that quantum computers cannot break is important. In 2024, the National Institute of Standards and Technology announced new codes that could keep secrets safe in classical and quantum computers. And the US government has created a plan to completely change to these new methods in 2035. But some researchers believe that important players may need to act quickly. Google, for example, recently announced that it intends to stop relying on RSA and ECC by 2029.
“If you’ve been thinking about making the post-quantum crypto revolution, you shouldn’t wait any longer,” Thompson said. “This is the time to do it.”
Quantum Dreams vs. Reality
Opinions differ on how easy it will be for Oratomic to create a quantum computer as amazing as the physicists described in the paper. For the lone leader of neutral atomic computing, the Caltech team’s predictions aren’t too surprising. “They are completely consistent with what we and others have predicted,” said Harvard’s Lukin, founder of the atom-neutral startup QuEra Computing. “But the estimates of these tools are important and it’s important to work with them carefully.”
And several key details remain unclear — particularly the error-correction measures critical to the Caltech team’s bold estimate — making it difficult for outside researchers to fully evaluate their claims.
Some researchers question some of the group’s predictions. For example, the Caltech team made “aggressive assumptions about the speed of the process they could do,” Thompson said. The team says in their paper that the machine will eventually be able to pull off the entire error correction process — check for errors, interpret what it finds, fix the errors, replace any stray atoms, and prepare to do it again — once every millisecond.
The machine will also have to maintain a cadence of error correction for days or weeks while the computer is running, something no team has done. “I would like to see a demonstration on a small scale, say, 100 or 1,000 qubits,” said Mark Saffman, a physicist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the lead scientist for quantum information Infleqtion, another initiative of the neutral atom. “Show me you can do a million rounds or something.”
The Caltech team knows that its project is ambitious and that bringing together all the components it has in mind will require a significant engineering and technology effort. At the same time, physicists do not see any insurmountable obstacles. “We just have to build these machines and see if they work,” Preskill said.
New Horizons
If any team succeeds in building a quantum computer that can realize Shor’s algorithm, it will mark the end – essentially, the era of “Noisy Intermediate Scale Quantum”, as Preskill called the era of pre-error correction in a 2018 paper. Each researcher has a vision of what to pursue first with the machine in the new era of “error tolerance”.
Huang said he will first run Shor’s algorithm, just to prove the device works. After that, he said he would try to use it to speed up machine learning — an application that should be detailed in future work.
Most of the architects building quantum computers, whether Oratomic or other startups, are physicists at heart. They are interested in physics, not cryptography. In particular, they are interested in all the things that a computer that knows the language of quantum mechanics can teach about the quantum field, such as what kind of materials can become superconductors even at high temperatures. Preskill, for his part, would like to simulate a quantum version of space-time.
The Caltech team knows they have years of work before their dreams have a chance to come true. But the researchers are not waiting to get started. “Choose a cooler life goal than building the world’s first computer with your friends!” said an excited Bluvstein, reached by phone shortly before their paper began, before rushing off to celebrate.
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