Comment on A tangled web of deals stokes AI bubble fears in Silicon Valley
frank@sopuli.xyz 14 hours agoThat’s how it’s been explained to me by laymen many many times. Just casually (ish, I have a math degree) looking at the math, chatting with a friend who is a quantum physicist, being involved with computers, etc I find that Grover’s Algorithm is not at all capable of something like that. I’m not sure there’s anything better in terms of breaking encryption
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grover's_algorithm
Grover’s algorithm could brute-force a 128-bit symmetric cryptographic key in roughly 264 iterations, or a 256-bit key in roughly 2128 iterations. It may not be the case that Grover’s algorithm poses a significantly increased risk to encryption over existing classical algorithms, however.[4]
I am stoked for what it could do for protein folding, or other heavy simulation work, but in terms of proper encryption I don’t believe it actually will change much.
valgarf@discuss.tchncs.de 13 hours ago
The typical example is Shor’s algorithm
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shor's_algorithm
It allows to efficiently find the prime factors of an integer - a problem without a known polynomial algorithm on a classical computer.
This would directly break RSA encryption, as it relies on factorisation being difficult.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSA_cryptosystem
However, there are encryption algorithms that are considered safe even against a quantum computer.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-quantum_cryptography
JustTesting@lemmy.hogru.ch 4 hours ago
Also the largest number ever factorized on a quantum computer (not simulated) is like 30. So this is like 1950’s level of computing(in terms of number of transistors vs qbits) and were 20-30 years of incremental change away from really threatening encryption
frank@sopuli.xyz 13 hours ago
That’s fair, Shor’s algorithm would probably break a bunch of older encryption. It’s a little further out of reach, in terms of feasibility but who knows how fast it could speed up