Quantum Bullshit

Quantum Computer

 Schneier on Security quotes a paper:

Cheating on Quantum Computing Benchmarks

Peter Gutmann and Stephan Neuhaus have a new paper—I think it’s new, even though it has a March 2025 date—that makes the argument that we shouldn’t trust any of the quantum factorization benchmarks, because everyone has been cooking the books:

Similarly, quantum factorisation is performed using sleight-of-hand numbers that have been selected to make them very easy to factorise using a physics experiment and, by extension, a VIC-20, an abacus, and a dog. A standard technique is to ensure that the factors differ by only a few bits that can then be found using a simple search-based approach that has nothing to do with factorisation…. Note that such a value would never be encountered in the real world since the RSA key generation process typically requires that |p-q| > 100 or more bits . As one analysis puts it, “Instead of waiting for the hardware to improve by yet further orders of magnitude, researchers began inventing better and better tricks for factoring numbers by exploiting their hidden structure”.

A second technique used in quantum factorisation is to use preprocessing on a computer to transform the value being factorised into an entirely different form or even a different problem to solve which is then amenable to being solved via a physics experiment…

Lots more in the paper, which is titled Replication of Quantum Factorisation Records with an 8-bit Home Computer, an Abacus, and a Dog. He points out the largest number that has been factored legitimately by a quantum computer is 35.

Previous posts that mention the word quantum, which may or may not be related to quantum computers.

Via Dennis.

Watering Can

The un-watering can

Spotted this sitting on a table at a friend's house. On one hand, it looks kind of cool, the handle is made of the same tubing as the spout. Closer inspection reveals that the tube that forms the handle is the same one that forms the spout. It is all one tube. It comes out of the top, goes over, down and back in the bottom and then continues across the bottom and then out the other side where it forms the spout. It really doesn't make any sense. But then the owner is in marketing and it is entirely possible that they needed a slick watering can for a prop for one of their campaigns and had this thing custom made for this one job, and now that it's over it's decorating his house.

FAFSA

That's FAFSA, not FASFA. FASFA sounds better, and it works just as well in Google, so maybe it doesn't matter. Not sure just what all the letters in FAFSA stand for, but the last three stand for Federal Student Aid, i.e. money for college. I looked into this a couple of years ago, but all I found was a bunch of yahoos telling me to fill out this gawd awful form and send it in. No indication if I (or more properly, my kids) would qualify for a grant or not. I could just see filling out this form that looks even worse than a Federal Income Tax form, digging out all the required financial information (how much do you have? how much did your dog make? are you now or have you ever been a member of the triple A?), filling in all the blanks, dotting all the i's, crossing all the t's, mailing it in and getting a response in 6 months that says, no you don't get no stinking money because your dog made more than a dollar and a half back in ought nine. It sounded like a giant cluster foo.

And I don't care about student loans, I don't want no stinking loans. That's the last thing anyone needs. But I've been out of work for a while, and my wife was making some noises, so I said I would look into it again, and I finally did.

This time I found an on-line estimator that lets you fill in a few blanks and comes back with your "Expected Family Contribution" (EFC). From this it looks like I've been contributing more than my share, so maybe we would qualify for a grant, so maybe it would be worthwhile to fill out the stupid form and mail it in. The glass-half-full part of me says probably not, but my better half will disagree. So it looks like I've got some paperwork to do. Bah.

I also found a link to a federal page that had the government's actual rules for calculating eligibility, but the link is dead. Stupid bureaucrats. Probably just as well. I imagine it is probably as opaque as the page describing Abby's Military grade Tom-Tom.

I'll let you know if this ever pans out.