Cargo Cult Redo
Richard Feynman during his 1974 commencement address at the California Institute of Technology coined the term cargo cult science. The term was just used over at the blog of Scott Aaronson at Shtetl-Optimized. Read his post and skip the rest here if you will. Or read the rest here and then his post.
As Wikipedia’s page says, cargo cults are religious practices that have appeared in many traditional tribal societies—often caused by interactions with technologically advanced cultures. Cargo cult science, as explained more pithily on this page, means following others’ procedures uncritically and expecting the same results without having ascertained whether the needed conditions apply in your particular setting.
Factoring is Hard?
Factoring large numbers is the key to the security of the famous RSA method. The 2048-bit RSA system is a real encryption method that is used in practice—2048 is the size of the numbers that must be hard to factor.
An obvious idea is to try and use quantum computers to factor these numbers. The trouble is that the known methods do not seem to work on 2048-bit numbers. The quantum computers that we can build in the near future are way too small for running these quantum algorithms.
Factoring is Easy?
However a group of Chinese researchers have just published a paper claiming that they can—although they have not yet done so—break 2048-bit RSA.
Bao Yan, Ziqi Tan, Shijie Wei, Haocong Jiang, Weilong Wang, Hong Wang, Lan Luo, Qianheng Duan, Yiting Liu, Wenhao Shi, Yangyang Fei, Xiangdong Meng, Yu Han, Zheng Shan, Jiachen Chen, Xuhao Zhu, Chuanyu Zhang, Feitong Jin, Hekang Li, Chao Song, Zhen Wang, Zhi Ma, H. Wang, and Gui-Lu Long
This is something to take seriously. It might not be correct, but it’s not obviously wrong. This would break a real encryption method since 2048-bit RSA is used in practice.
Scott factoring says:
The paper claims
well, it’s hard to pin down what it claims, but it’s certainly given many people the impression that there’s been a decisive advance on how to factor huge integers, and thereby break the RSA cryptosystem, using a near-term quantum computer. Not by using Shor’s Algorithm, mind you, but by using the deceptively similarly named Schnorr’s Algorithm. The latter is a classical algorithm based on lattices, which the authors then “enhance” using the heuristic quantum optimization method called QAOA.
All told, this is one of the most actively misleading quantum computing papers I’ve seen in 25 years, and I’ve seen
Cargo Cult Quantum Factoring
An interesting question is: Why would China allow this paper to be public given the huge importance of RSA? Could this be a sign that it is not real?
Open Problems
There it is—“Cargo Cult” in quantum algorithmic science—used by Scott. No doubt that it would have been approved by Feynman.
[fixed “cargo cult”–>cargo cult science]
Hello all
“Cargo Cult” is a long standing term in Anthropology.
Apparently, it was the collision of European explorers with Melanisians starting in the late 18th century that first got the “those who have the right rituals will get cargo” idea going. Anthropological studies have shown that the region was already very deeply involved with rituals, and this was likely a factor in the formation of the new theories.
There was a long history of various cults ebbing and flowing, before WWII brought another wave of the phenomena — how we think about “cargo cults” — to life.
Once one has seen cargo cults in another culture, it is much easier to see them in one’s own …
Alan, thanks. I think “science” went missing; I have fixed this.
Pls see these cracking/breaking methods of RSA and all other possible codes (including non-quantum-computers-using factorizations) on Twitter, which prove St. John’s Revelation, Chapter 18:
https://twitter.com/koitiluv1842/status/1413648310703853568