Things that make you go "Hmmmm…"

[BudgieJane]

It's amazing that Carol Vordermann can't do arithmetic like that in her head. She has a third-class degree in engineering, which is somewhat disappointing from her viewpoint, and mine as I would expect engineers to have the mental arithmetic skills.

Sorry to state the obvious, but to multiply by 75 in my head, I would multiply by 3, divide by 4, then shift the decimal point 2 places to the right.

The current incumbent (Rachel Riley who has an MSc in mathematics from Oxford) is much better at mental arithmetic.

[pinhodecarlos]

That can explains the engineers shortness here in the UK but worst we have people from other fields doing engineering work, such as biology, languages, etc. I find this amazing and painful, I keep escalating internally but no luck. Giving up was my solution. Stupidity is spread out.

[firejuggler]

[Batalov]

Mathematician withdraws preprint – 24 years after initial submission

Boris Shoikhet, then of the Independent University of Moscow, posted “Lifting formulas, Moyal product, and Feigin spectral sequence,” to arXiv on Oct. 28, 1998, proposing new conjectures in the field of quantum algebra.

Last month, he withdrew the article, with the comment, “The paper has been withdrawn due to a crucial mistake in the arguments.”

[VBCurtis]

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2212.12372.pdf

Claim is RSA-2048 can be broken with under 500 qubits.

[retina]

Originally Posted by VBCurtis

Claim is RSA-2048 can be broken with under 500 qubits.

That is 500 good qubits.

The addition of the word "good" makes a lot of difference. Once you include error correction qubits, and other maintenance qubits, etc., that figure quickly grows to perhaps 10x or more total qubits.

[Till]

Originally Posted by VBCurtis

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2212.12372.pdf

Claim is RSA-2048 can be broken with under 500 qubits.

Cite: "We find that a quantum circuit
with 372 physical qubits and a depth of thousands is neces-
sary to challenge RSA-2048 even in the simplest 1D-chain
system"

I am not familiar with quantum computing. What does "depth of thousands" mean?

[kriesel]

Re depth, https://quantumcomputing.stackexchan...uantum-circuit

[Till]

Originally Posted by kriesel

Re depth, https://quantumcomputing.stackexchan...uantum-circuit

Thank you.

So the depth seems to be something like the longest path of connected gates in the circuit (possibly after "transpilation").

[EdH]

One of my "better" machines doesn't like the cold. Last night it shut down due to 0F degrees (~ -18C) temperature around it. When I finally got it back up this morning, I asked the machine its temps and I think it's exaggerating. Maybe it's a "feels like" report:

$ sensors
. . .
temp1:        +46.0°C  (high = -128.0°C, hyst = +86.0°C)  sensor = thermistor
temp2:        -82.5°C  (high = +80.0°C, hyst = +75.0°C)  sensor = thermistor
temp3:        +41.5°C  (high = +80.0°C, hyst = +75.0°C)  sensor = thermistor
. . .

[Batalov]

and interesting comment:
"In Sweden, traffic fines are set at a percentage of income. The owner of Ikea got stopped for speeding and paid a fine in the six figures. We ought to do that here."