Ancient history: DEF CON 9 Talk on Quantum Computers
I wrote a little email screed to a friend about the risks to bitcoin from advances in quantum computing and was reminded of a paper I presented at DEF CON 9 back in 2001 on Quantum Computing, back then limited to 8 qubits.
The remotely relevant bit was what I really hope someone (other than me) will call “Gessel’s law” (after Moore’s law: P=2(y/1.5)) on the power of quantum computing, at least once, as I believe it may have been the first presentation of the formulation: P=22(y/2)
How did my predictions hold up over the last 20 years?
I estimated a crossover within about 10 years, or 2011. D-Wave claimed to offer a quantum computer 15x faster than a classical computer in 2015, 3-4 years later than I predicted. Google claimed quantum supremacy in 2019.
In 2020, D-Wave claimed to have a quantum computer with 5,000 qubits, slightly ahead of my prediction of 4,096 by 2021 back in 2001.