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As someone who works in the field of quantum computation, it's actually a little unpleasant that crypto always comes up. Crypto is interesting and quantum comp
by reikonomusha 9y ago
As someone who works in the field of quantum computation, it's actually a little unpleasant that crypto always comes up.
Crypto is interesting and quantum computers do have a part in it, but it's one of the least interesting things to talk about when it comes to what quantum computers can do.
It's like at the advent of the regular computer, and the application everyone talks about is how it will be able to do accounting. It's right, but there are so many other interesting things it can do.
To offer some fodder for further discussion, how about molecular and atomic simulation? Wouldn't it be nice if we could just simulate the behavior of a molecule to predict what useful properties it has? One could imagine just exhaustively searching for molecules of interest on a quantum computer.
Or how about using a quantum computer to bootstrap itself? Using a QC to build a better QC is in the realm of its utility.
Or how about solving some of these nasty computer science problems that crop their heads up everywhere, like graph coloring (or any of its equivalent incarnations)?
Factoring integers and searching boxes are really interesting developments in the theory of quantum computation, but the above stuff, to me, sounds a lot cooler.
- comicjk 9y ago> Wouldn't it be nice if we could just simulate the behavior of a molecule to predict what useful properties it has? We already do this with classical computers to a significant extent. It requires a lot of approximations, but it works fairly well for several useful applications, such as drug/protein binding prediction. I am really looking forward to quantum co-processors to help with this kind of calculation.
- drdre2001 9y agoGood point. NIST has a list of 50 or so algorithms that will provide speedups when implemented on a Quantum Computer:http://math.nist.gov/quantum/zoo/ http://math.nist.gov/quantum/zoo/.
- Cybiote 9y agoI enjoyed your post but I have a disagreement. Graph Coloring is np-complete or np-hard depending on what question you're asking. Grover's algorithm for unstructured search only provides a quadratic boost. If you're pulling from the papers on adiabatic evolution, these are simulated small instances with acceptance probabilities that would likely not be economical in real world scenarios. For quantum computers to solve np-complete problems in polynomial time would be highly surprising and seems just too good of an outcome. Especially considering the work showing exponential slowdowns for simple problems that defeat local search algorithms like QA. That said, there'll likely be many practical problems for which quantum annealing provides speed ups which vastly outstrip classical computers.
- p1esk 9y agoCan we use QC for deep learning?