So the "useful quantum computing" that is "imminent" is not the kind of quantum computing that involves the factorization of nearly prime numbers?

[0] https://algassert.com/post/2500

I have a degree in chemistry from that institution, and don't have a clue what this means beyond the $1,000,000,000 economic impact this facility is supposed to make upon our fair city, over the next decade.

[•] <https://quantumzeitgeist.com/vanderbilt-university-quantum-q...>

[0] In partnership with our government-subsidized "commercial quantum-ready" fiber network, EPB

The fact that error correction seems to be struggling implies unaccounted for noise that is not heat. Who knows maybe gravitational waves heck your setup no matter what you do!

The error correction milestone matters because it's the gate to scaling. Previous quantum systems had error rates that increased faster than you could add qubits, making large-scale quantum computing impossible. If Willow actually demonstrates below-threshold error rates at scale (I'd want independent verification), that unblocks the path to 1000+ logical qubit systems. But we're still probably 5-7 years from "useful quantum advantage" on problems like drug discovery or materials simulation.

The economic argument is underrated. Even if quantum computers achieve theoretical advantage, they need to beat rapidly improving classical algorithms running on cheaper hardware. Every year we delay, classical GPUs get faster and quantum algorithms get optimized for near-term noisy hardware. The crossover point might be narrower than people expect.

What I find fascinating is the potential for hybrid classical-quantum algorithms where quantum computers handle specific subroutines (like sampling from complex distributions or solving linear algebra problems) while classical computers do pre/post-processing. That's probably the first commercial application - not replacing classical computers entirely but augmenting them for specific bottlenecks. Imagine a drug discovery pipeline where the 3D protein folding simulation runs on quantum hardware but everything else is classical.

> 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.

Does anyone know how much underway it is? Do we need to worry that the switch away from RSA won't be broadly deployed before quantum decryption becomes available?

once someone makes a widget that extracts an RSA payload, their govt will seize, spend & scale

they will try to keep it quiet but they will start a spending spree that will be visible from space