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.
Here's a thought for the moderators, it'd be useful if for any story linked in a post there existed an unbiased, structured and concise, TLDR right below the story as a post, or a function to generate the TLDR, so that people would not have to necessarily link to the story, unless they really needed to.
FYI, the AI's TLDR assessment is that it would not call this a "breakthrough" that definitively puts us on a direct path to Q-Day. That won't happen until a fully functional, large-scale quantum computer capable of consistently breaking Bitcoin’s keys is still needed.