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Hi Scott, Do you think that chaotic systems would be better analysed by quantum computing over classical computing? More generally, is BQP powerful enough to d

Hi Scott, Do you think that chaotic systems would be better analysed by quantum computing over classical computing? More generally, is BQP powerful enough to deal with chaotic systems in the same way P is for linear systems? Oh, and I think your review of "Enlightenment Now" was a bit too rosy. When he analysed the data he's superb, but he seems to lambast people he heavily disagrees with. Its a tad disheartening.

ScottAaronson 8y ago
No, I don't think that QCs will help much for simulating chaotic systems, except insofar as those systems are also quantum-mechanical. For (e.g.) predicting the weather, there may be small quantum speedups that you can get here and there, from Grover's algorithm and faster gradient computation and so forth, but at a fundamental level, as far as anyone knows, you still need to just iterate the partial differential equation from one time step to the next, same as a classical computer does. Stepping back, note that "quantum" and "nonlinear" are two completely different concepts -- in fact, at the level of amplitudes (i.e., the Schrodinger equation), quantum mechanics is the one example we have in physics of a perfectly LINEAR theory! Alan Sokal had a lot of fun with that point in his "Social Text" parody article: http://www.physics.nyu.edu/sokal/transgress_v2/transgress_v2_singlefile.html http://www.physics.nyu.edu/sokal/transgress_v2/transgress_v2... On the other hand, this is perfectly compatible with quantum systems having chaotic phenomena at the level of observables (like the positions and momenta of particles), and in fact there's a whole field called "quantum chaos" that studies such situations.