Hacking at Quantum Speed with Shor's Algorithm | Infinite Series
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN recommends it as a clear, worked explanation of Shor's algorithm for building intuition.
What it is
PBS Infinite Series explains how Shor's algorithm lets a quantum computer break RSA encryption, building on earlier episodes about cryptography and the math of quantum computers. It works through the idea step by step.
Recommended by 3 HN commenters across 3 different months, 2018 to 2019.
What Hacker News said
Recommends adamisntdead · 2018-04 · on “Qusim.py – A toy multi-qubit quantum computer simulator written in Python”
You should check out these videos, one of them might give you an understanding! - [LINK] | Quantum Computers Explained - [LINK] | The Mathematics of Quantum Computers - [this video] | Hacking at Quantum Speed with Shor's Algorithm - [LINK] | A series by the author of the standard textbook These are videos I particularly like!
Recommends msclrhd · 2018-11 · on “The Case Against Quantum Computing”
It's not that they can execute a computation faster in the traditional sense. It is that you can exploit the quantum behaviour in some types of computation (e.g. factoring primes) to make the answer more probable, and thus more likely to be "observed", when you read the state of the quantum computer and thus make it easy to locate the correct answer compared to traditional algorithms. PBS Infinite Series has several videos on quantum computing and Shor's algorithm: 1. [LINK] "The Mathematics of Quantum Computers" 2. [LINK] "How to Break Cryptography" 3. [this video] "Hacking at Quantum Speed with Shor's Algorthm"
Recommends fossuser · 2019-10 · on “Quantum supremacy: the gloves are off”
I'd recommend Charles Petzold's Code: [LINK] Which does a great job building up computing from bits all the way to a adders, CPUs, and assembly language (with the historical background around it too). I think the easiest way to get an idea for Quantum Computing and what the difference is comes from watching a specific example, I thought this example of Shor's algorithm was pretty good: [this video]
Cites stcredzero · 2018-02 · on “An Argument Against Quantum Computers”
A note for the savvy: A quantum computer is not a magic bit-string that mysteriously flips to the correct answer. A n-qubit quantum computer is not like 2^n phantom computers running at the same time in some quantum superposition phantom-zone. That's the popular misconception, but it's effectively ignorant techno-woo. Here's what really happens. If you have a string of n-qubits, when you measure them, they might end up randomly in of of the 2^n possible configurations. However, if you apply some operations to your string of n-qubits using quantum gates, you can usefully bias their wave equations, such that the probabilities of certain configurations are much more likely to appear. (You can't