Australia to fund $620M quantum computer claimed to be first at 'utility-scale'

Australian researchers pioneered the development of solar panels, but the nation now imports them in huge quantities – a situation that's become emblematic of the nation's poor record of turning local innovation into jobs and profits across the supply chain. In more recent times, Australian researchers have done pioneering …

[pip25]

What's up with quantum computing anyway?

There was a lot of hype surrounding it a few years ago, but things seem to have suspiciously quieted down lately. Or are news simply being drowned out by the AI hype?

[Paul Crawford]

Re: What's up with quantum computing anyway?

I suspect much the same - over-hyped capabilities and time-scale, underwhelming results. Only difference is AI is actually delivering stuff now

Often wrong stuff, but the suckers customers are not really aware of that aspect yet.

[Denarius]

another free export

Typical of the Oz excuse for a government. Jump on bandwagon as the wheels fall off. Spend taxpayers money on bandwagon. Sometimes get it going, then _give_ it away to first multinational that asks. If bandwagon remains grounded, ignore waste of money. Rinse, repeat.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: another free export

Australia has been "on the bandwagon" of quantum computing for a long time. I remember Bob Clarke's group in UNSW in Sydney in the 1990s, and they have the "ARC Centre of Excellence for Quantum Computation and Communication Technology" (see www.cqc2t.org ) driving and directing research. I think that was set up about 20 years ago.

[Headley_Grange]

"a situation that's become emblematic of the nation's poor record of turning local innovation into jobs and profits across the supply chain."

Or, more likely, a situation caused by Australia having decent wages, working conditions and workers' rights compared to China paying low wages for porr working conditions and rights and subsidising costs to destroy industries in the West.

[Anonymous Coward]

So basically the Tories wet dream for the UK then? Just waiting for them to sever the link to the internet in favour of "Britnet" - woke free patriotic information for red white and blue strivers, with the national anthem on the hour every hour whether you want it played or not. (What's not stated is that the govt will be collecting metrics constantly to build your social credit score)

[Magani]

Uses?

'Which still leaves open the question of what Australia's machine will be used for. '

Cracking end-to-end encryption if ASIO has anything to do with it.

[Michael Wojcik]

Re: Uses?

It's extremely unlikely this particular machine will have enough effective error-corrected qubits to break even RSA, FFDH, or ECC asymmetric keys of currently-recommended size. It's even less likely that it would have enough to break symmetric keys of currently-recommended size. Even if it does, it would be one at a time, in a time-consuming, expensive process, so it would only be used for very special cases.

QC won't be a threat to commodity encryption for a very long time yet, if ever. We either don't quite, or only barely, have QCs that show supremacy (depending on which side you believe in that particular argument). Getting from there to breaking decent-size asymmetric keys in bulk requires a tremendous amount of capability improvement.