Galaxy Research Director Comments on Google's Quantum Paper: Practical Engineering Challenges Remain Unresolved

On March 31, Galaxy Research Director Alex Thorn posted on the X platform stating, “This Google quantum paper is very important because researchers have made breakthroughs in circuit optimization. Compared to previous proposals that required about 9 million physical qubits (Litinski 2023, based on photonic architecture), the circuits constructed in this study are expected to run Shor’s algorithm on approximately 500,000 physical qubits under reasonable conditions, and are based on superconducting architecture consistent with its own processor parameters. This means the circuit design has achieved about a 20-fold optimization improvement, partly due to better circuit design and partly due to more realistic hardware assumptions. However, practical engineering challenges (such as error correction, decoherence, and gate fidelity) have not changed. Additionally, while they developed these circuit designs, they did not disclose specific details but instead used a method of ‘responsible disclosure’ (utilizing zero-knowledge proofs, ZKP) to demonstrate the existence of these circuits, allowing external verification of their conclusions without revealing the specific designs. This approach is innovative and avoids leaking critical designs. Whether the required error correction capabilities, control of decoherence, and sufficient gate fidelity can be achieved in engineering terms in the future remains an independent and unresolved issue.”