Replication of Quantum Factorisation Records with an 8-bit Home Computer, an Abacus, and a Dog by Peter Gutmann and Stephan Neuhaus
Supposedly AI investors are poised to fuel this horse shit with your retirement money, now that the air is going out of that bubble. This paper comes in the nick of time. I’ve alluded to this shell game when quantum computers “factor” the number 15, basically by not including the gates which include the other possibilities for factors of 15. These guys make it abundantly clear why these are shell games, but doing the factorisations using a Vic-20, a dog, and an abacus. They’re vastly more familiar with the literature than I am, and so they’ve come up with more examples of fraudulent quantum computing “successes” than I was aware of. Apparently it’s very common in the “quantum computing” community to do these mathematical tricks and declare the immanent demise of RSA.
The paper is written at a level of high school algebra, with a few bits of pseudocode. It should be within the intellectual means of anyone familiar with these things. They also provide helpful guides to reproduce their work, which most “quantum computing” researchers do not.
8.2 Replication Guide
In order to allow others to replicate our work, we have made all of the code used publicly available [28]. Although it was run on a cycle-accurate simulator in order to provide precise cycle counts for each factorisation, actual 6502 hardware with the capabilities of a VIC-20 is still being produced and could be used [38][39][40]. Since there is lots of ROM space left with some of the given hardware, one could even put WOZMON and Microsoft Basic on it.
Replication of the abacus-based portion of the work may be performed using any standard abacus. Since only two or three columns are required for the replication of the quantum factorisations of 15, 21, and 35, any abacus of size 9, 11, or 13 columns (digits) may be employed.
Finally, the apparatus for the canine-based factorisation may be obtained from any animal shelter. Although our experiment used a Staffy, almost any dog breed should be suitable, although the smaller yappy dogs may over-report values.
What Pauli would say about quantum computing