Galaxy Research Director critiques Google's quantum paper: Practical engineering challenges like error correction remain unsolved

BlockBeats message, March 31, Galaxy research director Alex Thorn posted on the X platform, saying, “This Google quantum paper is very important because the researchers achieved a breakthrough in circuit optimization. Compared with earlier approaches that required about 9 million physical qubits (Litinski 2023, based on a photonic architecture), this study’s constructed circuits are expected, under reasonable conditions, to run Shor’s algorithm on about 500,000 physical qubits, and are based on a superconducting architecture whose parameters match those of its own processors.

This means the circuit design achieved an optimization improvement of roughly 20x. This advance comes partly from better circuit design and partly from more realistic hardware assumptions. However, the actual engineering challenges (such as error correction, decoherence, and gate fidelity) have not changed.

In addition, they developed these circuit designs but did not disclose specific details; instead, they proved the existence of these circuits through a ‘responsible disclosure’ method (using zero-knowledge proofs, ZKPs), allowing outsiders to verify their conclusions without seeing the specific design. This approach is innovative while also avoiding the leakage of key design details. As for whether, on the engineering level, it will be possible in the future to achieve the required error-correction capabilities, control decoherence, and reach sufficient gate fidelity, that still remains an independent and unsolved issue.”