Galaxy Research Director Reviews Google's Quantum Paper: Practical Engineering Challenges such as Error Correction Remain Unsolved

BlockBeats News, March 31st, Galaxy Research Director Alex Thorn posted on the X Platform, stating, "This Google quantum paper is very important because researchers have made a breakthrough in circuit optimization. Compared to the previously proposed scheme requiring around 9 million physical qubits (Litinski 2023, based on photonics architecture), the circuit built in this research is expected to run the Shor algorithm on around 500,000 physical qubits under reasonable assumptions, and is based on a superconducting architecture consistent with its own processor parameters."

This means that the circuit design has achieved an optimization improvement of about 20 times, with this progress partly coming from a better circuit design and partly from hardware assumptions closer to reality. However, actual engineering challenges (such as error correction, decoherence, gate fidelity) have not changed.

In addition, they have developed these circuit designs but have not publicly disclosed specific details. Instead, they have proved the existence of these circuits through a "responsible disclosure" method (using zero-knowledge proofs, ZKP), enabling external parties to verify their conclusions without seeing the specific design. This approach is innovative while also avoiding leakage of critical designs. Whether engineering can achieve the required error correction capability, control decoherence, and achieve sufficient gate fidelity in the future remains an independent and unresolved issue."