It seems like it would have been so easy for them to test programs against the failure case in the same way @yuvadm did. Just make it part of the competition rules that if an application solves the problem with quantum calls replaced with a random number generator, then it's not demonstrating true quantum improvement and is disqualified.
They said up front in the rules that they didn't want Failing With Style approaches to win, so why didn't they explicitly test for that?
Because then all entrants would fail the competition.
There has been no significant jump in capabilities such that a meaningful demonstration of general purpose or cryptographically-relevant quantum computing could be performed on "public hardware".
Presumably the organizers know this but still have incentives to drum up news about QC. So they ignore that problem and focus on how to obscure the fact this is a dog-and-pony show.
I mean, I'm sure you're right, but it would seem like the organizers were teeing themselves up for an inevitable "gotcha" moment, given that it is pretty easy for third parties to do exactly what was done here.
Paying 1 BTC for the privilege of getting dunked on in tech media seems like a bad trade.
They said up front in the rules that they didn't want Failing With Style approaches to win, so why didn't they explicitly test for that?
There has been no significant jump in capabilities such that a meaningful demonstration of general purpose or cryptographically-relevant quantum computing could be performed on "public hardware".
Presumably the organizers know this but still have incentives to drum up news about QC. So they ignore that problem and focus on how to obscure the fact this is a dog-and-pony show.
Paying 1 BTC for the privilege of getting dunked on in tech media seems like a bad trade.