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As I'm completely unfamiliar with the subject, I'm having a hard time wrapping my head around what kind of impact a big development in quantum computing would h
by TheAceOfHearts 10y ago
As I'm completely unfamiliar with the subject, I'm having a hard time wrapping my head around what kind of impact a big development in quantum computing would have. From what I read in the Wikipedia article, it can destroy a lot of our existing crypto, and I can guess at the consequences of this.
Taking a very long-term timeline into consideration, would it be speculated that quantum computers would ultimately replace traditional computers? Are there categories of problems for which it would be worse to use a quantum computer?
- kobeya 10y agohttp://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/the-talk-3 http://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/the-talk-3
- alexilliamson 10y agoThat felt informative. Was it... informative??
- edanm 10y agoIt was co-authored by a fairly famous researcher in the field (Scott Aaronson), so yes.
- kobeya 10y agoYou might enjoy the blog of the guy who co-wrote the script for the comic, himself a prominent quantum computer researcher: http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/ http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/
- alexilliamson 10y agoThis is great thank you. I'm a super-novice, but extremely fascinated by this field. I just ordered his book Quantum Computing since Democritus.
- mabbo 10y agoA friend of mine worked on adiabatic quantum computers at D-Wave for a few years. My understanding (which may be incorrect) is that the speedups are things like take 2^n algorithms and make them 2^(sqrt(n)) instead. It's still exponential, but it's a huge improvement when n hits 100. Will these replace traditional computers? Probably not. But you can bet there will eventually be cloud services that you submit very hard jobs and it spits back an answer faster than any traditional computer could.