Hacker News

Replace IBM Quantum back end with /dev/urandom

129 points by pigeons 7 hours ago | 16 comments

Strilanc 4 hours ago

This was exactly the premise of my sigbovik April Fool's paper in 2025 [1]: for small numbers, Shor's algorithm succeeds quickly when fed random samples. And when your circuit is too long (given the error rate of the quantum computer), the quantum computer imitates a random number generator. So it's trivial to "do the right thing" and succeed for the wrong reason. It's one of the many things that make small factoring/ecdlp cases bad benchmarks for progress in quantum computing.

I warned the project11 people that this would happen. That they'd be awarding the bitcoin to whoever best obfuscated that the quantum computer was not contributing (likely including the submitter fooling themselves). I guess they didn't take it to heart.

[1]: https://sigbovik.org/2025/proceedings.pdf#page=146

pigeons 7 hours ago

Project Eleven just awarded 1 BTC for "the largest quantum attack on ECC to date", a 17-bit elliptic curve key recovered on IBM Quantum hardware. Yuval Adam replaced the quantum computer with /dev/urandom. It still recovers the key.

logicallee 5 hours ago

but does the quantum hardware do it any faster?

petterroea 4 hours ago

> The author's own CLI recovers every reported private key at statistically indistinguishable rates from the IBM hardware runs.

dogma1138 5 hours ago

Just to point it out this isn’t a jab at QC but rather a jab at project 11 and possibly the submission author, basically they failed to validate the submission properly and the code proves that the solution is classical.

Recovering a 17bit ecc key isn’t a challenge for current classical computers via brute force.

aaron695 5 hours ago

[dead]

logicallee 5 hours ago

if the solution is faster than random it could still be a real solution on a quantum computer.

amoshebb 3 hours ago

“recovers every reported private key at statistically indistinguishable rates from the IBM hardware runs.”

jjcm 3 hours ago

Truly an unfortunate thumbnail crop for this story: https://image.non.io/b3f69546-aeb3-48c3-a76d-723f29b28f48.we...

NetOpWibby 2 hours ago

This is fantastic

dlcarrier 4 hours ago

A 17 bit key has 131072 possibilities, which is trivially easy to brute force. Defeating it with a quantum computer is still very much a physics demonstration, and not at all attempting to be a useful computing task.

tsimionescu 3 hours ago

The point here is that the quantum computer component of the original solution is not doing anything - that the algorithm being run overall is not actually a quantum algorithm, but a classical probabilistic algorithm.

If the quantum computer were a key component of the solution, replacing it with an RNG would have either no longer yielded the right result, or at least would have taken longer to converge to the right result. Instead, the author shows that it runs exactly the same, proving all of the relevant logic was in the classical side and the QC was only contributing noise.

arcfour 3 hours ago

Perhaps I'm ignorant, but isn't the idea that you can do it faster than brute force?

If the results are statistically identical to guessing then it seems like you've just built a Rube Goldberg contraption.

iberator 4 hours ago

Quantum computing is 3 decades old scam. Not even Google was able to prove that their quantum computer works LOL.

weakened algorithms to the extreme (17 bits in 2026 LOL).

wasting_time 3 hours ago

Didn't Google recently report a verifiable quantum advantage?

https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/technology/research/qu...

josefx 2 hours ago

Dont they report an advantage based on simulating quantum effects every other year? I was promissed a quick way to decrypt my old harddrives decades ago, can we have that at some point before the sun burns out?

neuroelectron 60 minutes ago

Imagine investing trillions of dollars on slightly worse random numbers. I suppose it's a better use of money than DEI hiring and political correctness initiatives. At least random numbers don't destroy society systematically.