Replace IBM Quantum back end with /dev/urandom

Replace IBM Quantum back end with /dev/urandom(github.com)

383 points by pigeons 23 days ago | 50 comments

Strilanc 23 days ago |

This was exactly the premise of my sigbovik April Fool's paper in 2025 [1]: for small numbers, Shor's algorithm succeeds quickly when fed random samples. And when your circuit is too long (given the error rate of the quantum computer), the quantum computer imitates a random number generator. So it's trivial to "do the right thing" and succeed for the wrong reason. It's one of the many things that make small factoring/ecdlp cases bad benchmarks for progress in quantum computing.

I warned the project11 people that this would happen. That they'd be awarding the bitcoin to whoever best obfuscated that the quantum computer was not contributing (likely including the submitter fooling themselves). I guess they didn't take it to heart.

[1]: https://sigbovik.org/2025/proceedings.pdf#page=146

pseudohadamard 22 days ago | |

You wrote that? Nice piece of work! Came here to post exactly this, that's the sigbovik paper in practice.

I'm still waiting for the Quantum Bogosort version of this "factorisation". For those not familiar with the algorithm, it relies on the many-worlds interpretation and is:

  Shuffle the list randomly
  If the list is sorted, stop
  If it isn’t sorted, destroy the entire universe

Adaptation of this algorithm to factorisation is left as a homework exercise for the student.

cwillu 21 days ago | | |

Minor optimization: it is sufficient to merely destroy the user.

pigeons 23 days ago |

Project Eleven just awarded 1 BTC for "the largest quantum attack on ECC to date", a 17-bit elliptic curve key recovered on IBM Quantum hardware. Yuval Adam replaced the quantum computer with /dev/urandom. It still recovers the key.

logicallee 23 days ago | |

but does the quantum hardware do it any faster?

derangedHorse 22 days ago | | |

> takes each shot's (j, k, r) and accepts d_cand = (r − j)·k⁻¹ mod n iff it passes the classical verifier

Judging by the fact the original code does more classical work than the prg solution, and in more practical terms, the fact it makes network calls, I'd say the quantum-integrated code is a lot slower for this set of problems.

src: https://github.com/GiancarloLelli/quantum/blob/7925f6ec5b57f...

petterroea 23 days ago | | |

> The author's own CLI recovers every reported private key at statistically indistinguishable rates from the IBM hardware runs.

dogma1138 23 days ago |

Just to point it out this isn’t a jab at QC but rather a jab at project 11 and possibly the submission author, basically they failed to validate the submission properly and the code proves that the solution is classical.

Recovering a 17bit ecc key isn’t a challenge for current classical computers via brute force.

holografix 22 days ago | |

It’s a jab at QC and a right hook onto IBM’s snake oil selling chin.

pseudohadamard 22 days ago | |

Recovering a 17 bit ECC key isn't a challenge for a barking dog either.

logicallee 23 days ago | |

if the solution is faster than random it could still be a real solution on a quantum computer.

PunchyHamster 22 days ago | | |

well, it's slower than random

amoshebb 23 days ago | | |

“recovers every reported private key at statistically indistinguishable rates from the IBM hardware runs.”

jjcm 23 days ago |

Truly an unfortunate thumbnail crop for this story: https://image.non.io/b3f69546-aeb3-48c3-a76d-723f29b28f48.we...

NooneAtAll3 22 days ago | |

> contains the code and submission

perfection

NetOpWibby 23 days ago | |

This is fantastic

goodmythical 22 days ago | |

Not sure if we're looking at the same thing, but surely that's the 't' in 'quan(tumslop)'?

lynndotpy 22 days ago | | |

Yes, but the t looks like a c, making it read like a "slop" of a sexual bodily fluid.

functionmouse 22 days ago | |

yucky

croemer 22 days ago |

The person who won the challenge with this apparently misleading code seems to have absolutely no quantum computing background. He writes this as background about himself:

> Technology leader with 10+ years in enterprise software, full-stack architecture, and cloud-native development. Background in computer science with hands-on experience across .NET, Python, Rust, and Cloud ecosystems. Currently working as Cloud GTM Specialist focused on solution architecture and sales engineering.

Looking at the commit history, this looks vibe coded: https://github.com/GiancarloLelli/quantum

bhouston 22 days ago | |

Yeah it has vibe coding tells all over it. It was also my first thought when reading through this.

pseudohadamard 22 days ago | | |

Kinda telling that an AI hallucination is the best "quantum cryptanalysis" candidate we have.

lkm0 22 days ago |

"dequantization" is a thing and it's a very legitimate part of quantum information research. It's useful to probe if something was truly quantum or just smokes and mirrors, because it helps us understand where the boundary between quantum and classical lies. Another dequantized result from the past days: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.21908

dlcarrier 23 days ago |

A 17 bit key has 131072 possibilities, which is trivially easy to brute force. Defeating it with a quantum computer is still very much a physics demonstration, and not at all attempting to be a useful computing task.

tsimionescu 23 days ago | |

The point here is that the quantum computer component of the original solution is not doing anything - that the algorithm being run overall is not actually a quantum algorithm, but a classical probabilistic algorithm.

If the quantum computer were a key component of the solution, replacing it with an RNG would have either no longer yielded the right result, or at least would have taken longer to converge to the right result. Instead, the author shows that it runs exactly the same, proving all of the relevant logic was in the classical side and the QC was only contributing noise.

arcfour 23 days ago | |

Perhaps I'm ignorant, but isn't the idea that you can do it faster than brute force?

If the results are statistically identical to guessing then it seems like you've just built a Rube Goldberg contraption.

nkrisc 22 days ago | |

But if the QC’s contribution is indistinguishable from that of a random number generator, then what is being demonstrated?

pseudohadamard 22 days ago | | |

Quantum peddler grifting, I think.

jMyles 22 days ago |

Pasting my comment from the other article here - curious to understand the degree to which I'm understanding this.

----

The article itself is maddeningly vague on exactly what happened here.

At first blush, it looks like the quantum computer was just used to generate random noise? Which was then checked to see if it was the private key? Surely that can't be.

The github README [0] is quite extensive, and I'm not able to parse the particulars of all the sections myself without more research. One thing that caught my eye: "The key insight is that Shor's post-processing is robust to noise in a way that raw bitstring analysis is not."

"This result sits between the classical noise floor and the theoretical quantum advantage regime. At larger curve sizes where n >> shots, the noise baseline drops below 1% and any successful key recovery becomes strong evidence of quantum computation."

So... is one of the main assertions here simply that quantum noise fed into Shor's algorithm results in requiring meaningfully fewer "shots" (this is the word used in the README) to find the secret?

Someone help me understand all this. Unless I'm missing something big, I'm not sure I'm ready to call this an advancement toward Q-Day in any real-world sense.

0: https://github.com/GiancarloLelli/quantum

croemer 22 days ago | |

Commit history looks vibe coded doesn't it? Don't read too much into anything you see there. It's what Claude or Codex wrote after being asked to solve the challenge.

int32_64 22 days ago |

"quantum grifting" has hit the cryptocurrency space brutally.

Scammers can take an old defunct coin or create a new one, buy up/create supply, strap ML-DSA on to it, and pump their shitcoin claiming it's quantum safe, then they can unload.

Eventually low information retail will get wise to this, I honestly don't know who this even works on right now.

yieldcrv 22 days ago | |

It’s English as a Second Language crowds and it’s sad

NooneAtAll3 22 days ago |

does the number of calls to "QM" match between the implementations?

api 22 days ago |

They are missing the point though. The point is not even to be faster but to show that the QC is QCing. It can be slower than random search, and in fact might be expected to be. It’s kind of like early fusion plasma experiments that required vastly more energy than you got from fusion.

We are still doing science and engineering experiments, not making production anything.

delfinom 22 days ago | |

You miss the point of this rebuttal.

QC relies on the observed output being statistically significant. This rebuttal is pointing out that Project Eleven only ran the algorithm once. At this point, there is no proof the IBM QC platform is generating anything statistically significant, especially more significant than the performance of feeding it /dev/urandom.

Basically, there is no proof this was real quantum computing instead of random noise picked up by the hardware inside the QC.

Now to show that the QC is doing anything against this rebuttal, they have it run it a significant number of times and show that it breaks the key a larger amount of times than feeding it a uniform distributed random noise source like /dev/urandom.

oncallthrow 22 days ago |

Shame that this report is LLM-generated slop.