Quantum Computing: What’s in the Box?

They say nature abhors a vacuum but a bullshitter absolutely adores a knowledge vacuum, that is, an area of expertise where most people don’t havea full or even partial understanding of the topic and this can be exploited to fill the knowledge gaps with outlandish and implausible rubbish by someone who is relying on the fact that their audience don’t know any better.

There are many examples in the tech-sphere these days, for instance, AI is not intelligence and likely never will be: it’s just a web trawler with a highly specialized algorithm or set of instructions, and it’s the fact that it has such a monumental dataset that it seems able to mimic human activity. Another one is Bitcoin which is a constant high-anxiety roller-coaster ride of sleepless nights for investors who can never truly rest and be peaceful with their investment for fear they miss the start of the rinse-cycle sell-off and find themselves one of the last poor chumps holding the empty bag. It was designed to be a medium of exchange beyond the control of the banking system, but it can never be that now; it has become an investment in itself, contrary to the whole ethos and rationale behind its creation. This subversion has turned it into a paltry but elaborate pyramid scam or Ponzi-scheme in high-tech camouflage, and it is due to enter the rinse and shrink cycle once all the suckers get on board again.

From what I noticed, it wreaked havoc on the economy of the UAE. I was there when the UAE went crazy for Bitcoin because everybody only saw the upward trend and the hype. I worked in the UAE as a school teacher during the growing Bitcoin bubble and eventual crash and my friend even taught a syllabus produced by the government, which taught the students that they couldn’t lose their money with Bitcoin. Then of course, the Bitcoin Ponzi scheme entered its shrink and rinse the suckers out phase, once the pension funds and major world governments had sunk enough money in it to pay off the players who got in earlier and who knew when to start selling, leaving the mugs holding the empty bag. Ultimately, its dramatic crash forced the UAE to implement a raft of new policies which can only have been a result of having to make backroom deals with the IMF and World Bank and might explain the reversal of several of its previous long-term policies.

For instance, at this time the UAE started shaking down their population for any bit of spare change they could get out of them; so the place I lived, a lovely seaside town called Khor Fakkan, suddenly implemented parking charges throughout the whole town and elsewhere in the country there was even a meanspirited 5 dirham charge to see the view from Jebel Jeis, the highest mountain in the country. It was clear that something had seemingly changed in the economy; it was about the same time, in 2020, that the UAE decided to officially recognize the state of Israel and allow Israelis to do business in their country, shortly afterwards an Israeli woman called Frida Kiwan was caught entering the country with half a kilogram of cocaine. 

Clearly this was one of the IMF’s conditions. Furthermore, the woman had been sentenced to death, but was recently given a full pardon and released. Such is the power of Israel that its citizens can carry out specific drug crimes in the strictest country in the world for such crimes and get off Scot-Free with a pardon from Sheikh Mohammed himself. The implication is clear and I won’t say anymore – I don’t want to get arrested and imprisoned myself next time I stop over at Dubai airport, and not being Israeli, it’s unlikely I will experience the same favourable personal munificence and leniency of the ruling royal family. Shortly after Frida’s initial arrest another Israel, Halil Dasuki, was also arrested in Dubai on suspicion of planning to smuggle half a
ton of cocaine from Israel to the UAE. Isn’t it wonderful what quality of life improvements you get when you open the door to Israelis to
freely enter your country?[i]

 

Most of these new technologies are not improving the internet and our experience but ruining it. It now takes longer to weed out the AI voiced artificially generated Youtube videos than it does to actually watch a video based on the content you want to see and now websites can be created entirely using AI text generation, and there are more and more websites which have no real or authentic content whatsoever. Now the latest bogey and bullshit man is quantum computing. It has communicated with extra-terrestrial intelligence! It has become self-aware! It can end the world! It will replace humanity! All of these provocative ideas have been rolled out recently in the tech media fringe. Quantum computers have become a mystery box of possibilities but few people really have a clue what’s in the box.

There’s often an attempt in the case of science and tech news to use dubious and sometimes downright duplicitous methods to create excitement and mild hysteria to propel a story forward, which might be beneficial in some way to certain company’s share-prices. If those companies are also supported by the shadow-government and secret intelligence infrastructure of the United States for example, then so much the better that those companies  be reported to be over-performing rather than failing spectacularly, and that the news that the world’s first commercial available quantum computer, for instance,  could also be used to contact aliens, according to the most fevered reports, then what a great info-coup in the tech based bullshit  and international propaganda wars.

Clearly there must be aspects of quantum computing which are not being released to the public, but the problem is how to win the propaganda and tech battle against international adversaries without releasing at least something which might be somewhat based in reality.

The West’s two major competitors in the war for quantum computing dominance are clearly China and Russia. Quantum computing in the West seems to be focused around the work and developments of both the United States and that beleaguered, beggared and wholly buggered up country, my own rapidly disintegrating temporary home of the United Kingdom, I am tempted to say Great Britain but the ‘Great’ rings very hollowly in my ears these days and I am more than ready to follow Kier Starmer’s suggestion because I do indeed know where the door is and have been happily swinging back and forth through the door of my much despoiled country these past 25 years, I fear however the next time I leave my country will be the last because I doubt there will be anything to return to except a steaming nuclear crater when the Russian Bear has finally had enough of being goaded, baited and poked by the sordid self-destructing gang of perverts we seem to have had ruling us for as long as I can remember. The problem with these same sordid self-destructing gang of perverts is that they seem to be more than willing to expose the 60 odd million men women and children of all races presently resident in the UK, to the far from beneficial effects of a nuclear blast radius; no doubt because they can’t wait to get into their comfy well-appointed bunkers and revel in the thought that they will be living in comfort and safety while the world burns off the rabble and what the late Prince Philip called ‘useless food eaters’ to a blackened stubble above them, while they revel in their VIP privilege which allows them to remain alive.

 

Being one of many millions of stalks of blackened stubble isn’t  one of my life-goals so I’ll probably be in Thailand by the time the nukes start falling and I suggest you Britbongs out there at least ensure you have a valid passport and get ready to book that flight and that you don’t turn around to watch the fall of Sodom lest you become a pillar of irradiated carbon which seems to be what we get these days for not making that small effort to be a just a little bit better informed about the true nature of the environment around you. It all seems like an awful Darwinian experiment at this point to be honest, where a global apex predator, is gradually devouring and destroying countries while we all huddle and cower in confusion, most of us not even knowing who the predator is and those that do are not allowed to name them and tell the others, but it hardly matters because they wouldn’t believe us anyway and would turn on us and start calling us names even as the predator is right behind them and gobbles them up.

But to get back on track, again, the first thing to do to prepare you to understand quantum computing, is to explain what quantum computing isn’t, and to try to suitably lower your expectations, by giving the example of what passes for a quantum computer in China. Understandably, information about the precise level of success and achievement of China’s programme of quantum computer development is scant indeed and this news about the latest developments in Chinese quantum computer is from 4 years ago .[2]

The Chinese Jiuzhang photonic quantum computer is technically a quantum computer, but only really by the loosest possible definitions of the term ‘computer’. It doesn’t actually compute or calculate anything, and is almost an analogue machine, except it happens to use light as its main mechanism of action which technically and barely, makes it a quantum computer.

The Jiuzhang computer can perform only one task: Boson sampling. Except it uses photons and not bosons. Boson sampling is just calculating the trajectories of a spread of sub-atomic particles. Something which classical computers would apparently take half a billion years to calculate and the Chinese quantum computer, by virtue of the fact that it can perform boson sampling in 200 seconds means it is the second computer in the world to achieve ‘quantum supremacy’ which means it can achieve a task more quickly than a classical computer.  However, when you actually look at what the Chinese quantum computer is and how it works, you realise there’s a bit of a sleight of hand but a very good piece of propaganda which no one seems willing or able to call them out on.

It’s hard to know why no tech website seems willing to point out the fact that the Jiuzhang cannot really be called a computer, what it really is, is an optics experiment and nothing more. Even Reddit seems to have failed on this occasion and no one there seemed to have noticed that this is just an elaborate optics experiment, just an example of smoke, mirrors and photons.

The principle behind it is surprisingly simple. That photons are sent from a laser to interact with a programmable series of channels, and then the photons pass through a series of crystals and lenses and such until the state and number of photons are measured finally and presumably their state relative to the state at which they were sent in. It seems to resemble something like the set up for the delayed choice quantum eraser experiment and is hardly much more than an elaboration on the classic double slit experiment.

It seems like a bit of a swizz and is apparently the only declared entrant to China’s claim to harnessing the power of quantum and Russia’s attempt isn’t a great deal more impressive. In February 2024, Russian scientists announced that they had developed a 20-qubit quantum computer and planned to increase the qubit number to 50–100 which is really not an awful lot and shows that they are far behind in terms of the ongoing tech-race. I think this certain level of underperformance might explain the unimpressed look on Putin’s face and the somewhat sheepish attitude of the scientists in the image below:

The Chinese have also unveiled the Origin Wukon 72 qubit in early 2024 and have recently announced the development of the 504 qubit quantum chip which they claim will allow them to match Western advances in quantum computing, which shows that there is open acknowledgement that their tech-level in quantum computing is some way behind the West and the first commercially available D-Wave quantum computer was eagerly snapped up by the Chinese who promptly tried to use it to attack 22bit encryption codes[3], however since nobody uses 22bit encryption anymore, because it is outdated and not secure, and today’s RSA inscription is based on 2048bit encryption codes, this Chinese attempt is not particularly impressive and shows that for the time being, and perhaps a bit longer, our encryption infrastructure will remain secure.  

Breaking a 2048-bit RSA key would take 1 billion years with a classical computer and it is considered impossible for a classical computer to factorise any number greater than 2048 bits. A bit is a binary digit so a 2048bit RSA key has 2048 binary digits which are sequences of 1’s and 0’s, which equates to roughly 3.321 decimal digits. So a 2048 bit RSA key will have 2048 divided by 3.321.. digits, so roughly a number with 617 digits.  

The RSA encryption key is a based on a fairly simple principle which becomes phenomenally difficult to calculate even by the most advanced classical computers. A 2048bit RSA encryption key is an extremely large, semi-prime number, of 617 digits, which is the product of two prime factors. It is called a ‘semiprime’ because only those two numbers when multiplied together can produce that particular large number. That is, two particular prime numbers which when multiplied, give the encryption key number. While the decryption key is the identity of those two particular prime factors. A very simple example of a semiprime would be the number 10 which we can easily see has two prime factors: 2 and 5. We can probably work out a few more for ourselves if we were so inclined. 21 is another one, being produced by factoring two prime numbers, 7 and 3. The reason large semiprimes are so good for encryption is because these numbers are only divisible by the two primes which in themselves are not divisible at all, so they create a closed loop, secured by only two numbers and finding those two numbers is like trying to find a needle in planet-size haystack.

It is estimated to take a billion years for a classical computer to find the two prime numbers which when multiplied makes a 617 digit number, solely because the classical computer goes through all the numbers and systematically and sequentially multiples them together until it gets the correct number. It’s a kind of brute force approach which doesn’t see any deeper relationship, pattern or significance in the key number.

It would apparently require a quantum computer with 4,000 qubits and with minimal system noise to break 2048bit RSA encryption or a quantum computer with 20 million noisy qubits, but estimations vary between those two numbers, so this really shows how far away we are from breaking RSA encryption since it cannot even be reliably speculated how many qubits a quantum computer would even need or the length of time it would take, predictions of which potentially range from 8 hours to 100 days.

Historically much smaller RSA numbers have been factored with quantum computers however in 2012, physicists used a four-qubit quantum computer to factor 143, that is, it figured out that 11 times 13 is 143, something most primary school kids could probably do by reciting their 11 times table, so not terribly impressive. Then in 2014 they used a similar device to factor 56,153, which admittedly is a little more impressive, since it would be unlikely that the same class would be reciting their 233 times table to its 241st iteration, or vice versa for that matter, since this is what it amounts to as the prime factors or 56,153 are 233 and 241.

What passes for the most common, productive and ostensibly ‘successful’ area of quantum computing is the D-Wave quantum computer which operates using quantum annealing, this technically is not truly quantum computing since it doesn’t use true quantum-gates, and is not a universal computer which can perform all the tasks a classical computer can, but more a specific kind of computer designed to solve only ‘optimization problems’. Annealing is the process of heating and cooling substances to change their structure, making them stronger, more resistant. In quantum computing, this metaphor is used to describe the process by which energy is inputted into a quantum system and that system then finds its lowest energy level, or quantum ground state, which is the solution to the problem being inputted.  For me, the lowest energy level, and quantum ground state sounds like an ideal day for me lazing in bed, half dressed in a dressing gown, looking out of my window at the sky above and occasionally typing stuff like this into my computer before rolling over and having a nice little nap.  The qubit nodes cycle through various energy states and unlike traditional classical bits, these are fully able to interact and instead of solving a problem with sequential brute force rapid calculations, the quantum computer maps the problem using the qubit nodes after cycling through all possibilities of inter relationship between the nodes, the lowest energy state is found and this reflects the solution to the problem which is then returned as an answer.

One of the particular problems however with quantum annealing is that it is a very noisy process. I don’t mean literally noisy like the Heathrow bound jets above my West London home coming in to land on a windy day when I’m trying to have my afternoon doze, but noisy in the sense that noise in technology is a kind of interference which obfuscates or degrades information. The problem is that the quantum state manifests directly at the extreme limits of our universe, whether that be a limit of size in the case of atoms and molecules, or the limit of speed as with the speed of light, or the lowest limit of temperature, at these limits quantum phenomena can be observed, or rather…..well, ‘inferred’ has to be the word, but the problem is this state is very easily disturbed and breaks down into ‘decoherence’ once energy enters the system. So adding instructions via microwave pulses to a quantum circuit adds noise to the system which temporarily makes any reading meaningless, so in quantum annealing there are specific phases during which peak quantum calculation activity can actually take place, outside of the instruction
and programming time.

Like classical computers, a quantum computer’s main seat of activity is on its silicon processor chip but the principal difference is that the silicon must be kept at just above absolute zero in order for the specific superconductors to enter a quantum superposition state. Instructions are sent as microwave pulses via a complex series of wires and cables, where they are then converted from digital signals to analogue magnetic fields by the DAC converter, which changes the state of the qubits, this is called an ‘operator’ and a series of ‘operators’ changing the state of the qubit is called a quantum algorithm, where an algorithm is just a word meaning a series of instructions for the bits. The process is reversed to read the final state of the qubits and the magnetic fields are converted into microwave pulses by a ADC convertor and read out on a classical computer.

The problem is that multiple control lines need to be applied to each qubit to send instructions or read the data and these introduce thermal noise which temporarily collapses quantum superposition state until the heat is dissipated, this slows down the effective calculation time since the processor is only in a quantum state for limited periods of time. Without accurately being able to judge the optimum time for the qubits to enter the superposition phase, noise is inevitable which effectively means, random and meaningless signals and data readings.

The quantum annealing processor chip contains qubits which are composed of niobium superconductor loops, where the state of the qubit is not merely the traditional 1 or 0 of the binary classical computing system,  which is created by a stored charge, but is instead a magnetic field of changing polarity which when measured can be either up or down, thus a 1 or 0 state, but when the qubit is operational it exists in a state of quantum superposition and can be in any state between 1 and 0 and both 1 AND 0 at the same time, until measuring it collapses it into decoherence.

Niobium is generally used in steel alloys where durability and resistance to corrosion are important such as in gas pipelines. The niobium loops have a number of switches which are simply two layers of superconductor material with an insulating layer between, which exploit the Josephson effect of quantum tunnelling and this is the core of the magnetic qubit.[4]

The real processing of the quantum annealing circuit is therefore done while the result is not being observed, and the qubits can interact with each other like a group of nodes, having infinite values between 1 and 0, and cooperating to solve specific types of optimisation of efficiency problems. The classic example of an optimisation problem is the ‘traveling salesman problem’ which is how to calculate the most efficient route a salesman must follow, in order to sequentially visit any number of locations on a map. 

Classical computers solve these problems through trial and error, which is also known as ‘brute force’ which although the calculations are ultra rapid, the sheer number of combinations the computer has to go through in order to reach the lowest distance travelled in order to reach all the points, by calculating every possible combination, can potentially take quite a long time.[5] A relatively low number, such as five cities will take a classical computer 0.0085 seconds while a modest increase to 11 cities will take the computer an estimated 67 seconds, and this number increases exponentially with the increase in the number of cities, or nodes which the salesman must visit. 5 cities effectively means 5 starting points and then a combination of all the other remaining points and from five items placed in any order there are a possible 120 combinations. This is the factorial of a number and is expressed as 5! and can be calculated by multiplying the number by all the previous numbers so: 5*4*3*2*1 = 120. If you do the same thing with 11 cities, even though you have only doubled the number of cities, the number of combinations increases dramatically, so you get 10! = 10*9*8*7*6*5*4*3*2*1 = 3628800 combinations of how those ten cities can be sequentially arranged. The computer has to sequentially calculate over three million datasets and then select the optimum dataset which has the least total distance between all the cities or nodes.

I suppose one thing stands out about all this, is that DARPA and Lockheed Martin are heavily involved in quantum computing, and such ‘optimisation’ problems which are solved using quantum annealing computers, will inevitably include the most effective way to deploy bombers to middle-east countries to create maximum damage to military or civilian targets or perhaps the best way to deploy police-offers to be able to arrest the maximum number of protestors, assuming of course they are not left-wing or liberal protestors, where the objective would be how to deploy police in order to make them as intentionally ineffective as possible. All such problems would be tailor made for a quantum annealing computer and it’s sadly probably only a matter of time that we find that the fruits of quantum computing will not be making contact with extra-terrestrial civilisations, or solving the lingering big questions of human existence, but calculating how to more effectively wipe out more middle-easterners or how to more effectively lock up white people for thinking they have free speech.