Interestingly, Vivek Wadhwa said that his source for quantum computing being useful for travelling salesman by trying all possibilities in parallel was from the

Interestingly, Vivek Wadhwa said that his source for quantum computing being useful for travelling salesman by trying all possibilities in parallel was from the researcher Michelle Simmons in a Ted talk. I decided to watch it to see how he'd misinterpreted it and he hadn't! From 4:30 Simmons brings out the laundry list of quantum computing misconceptions. These are that the TSP scales poorly for classical computers and implies it doesn't for QC, implies that there's an efficient quantum algorithm for list lookups because the list can be read in parallel, and says the power of QC is partially because you can store so much information in the superposition (which is, at the very least, misleading). Then she starts comparing the power of QC and classical computers, saying that a 300 bit QC would be more powerful than all the computers in the world put together. In a section that's about what quantum computers will be useful for she includes as examples economic and climate modelling, which is news to me. The slides even include the phrase - 'Quantum computer- can check many different possibilities in parallel'. All in all, I'm not surprised that Wadhwa was confused. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cugu4iW4W54 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cugu4iW4W54