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Commercialising Quantum Computers
- m3kw9 6y agoThe analogy is like crypto currency, it is even harder to understand and use than that for most people.
- Robotbeat 6y agoCryptocurrency is supposed to be used by regular people (and that's how it gets money, basically as a pyramid scheme). Quantum computers are supposed to be used for a certain class of problems where it can do better than classical computers. So I'd say it's a significantly different domain and it doesn't really matter that most people don't understand it because it's a very specialized use case.
- tyingq 6y agoWell, you would have to demonstrate a problem space where the faster solve was worth the higher cost. Does that exist yet?
- emteycz 6y agoFor example, at an air operator company, if you can calculate optimal schedule of plane flights so you fly as least miles as possible, you can make millions daily.
- tyingq 6y agoRight, but it's not possible now, is it?
- emteycz 6y agoDownscaled version is possible with the quantum computers of today, if that's what you mean. Optimization is done today - manually.
- tialaramex 6y agoThis is a travelling salesman problem. It's true that a conventional computer cannot truly solve this problem for large size inputs because it is NP-hard. Whether the inputs for an actual scheduled aviation company are large enough to make this important I somewhat doubt, but regardless: We have good heuristics for this problem which are very close to the likely best solution. So instead of an amazing pay off for a true solution you get in fact only a slight improvement or worse in some cases merely confirmation that your existing heuristic answer was actually the best possible.
- emteycz 6y agoCould you please point me to some of these alternative solutions?
- chorsestudios 6y agoClassical computers might not find the optimal schedule but can likely solve for good enough scheduling for a fraction of the price. I’m curious if the difference would result in millions daily for a single air operator company
- s1dev 6y agoQuantum computers don’t have such a compelling case for optimization. Classical optimization algorithms are really good. Usually if you look hard enough you can find a sqrt(n) speed up but I don’t think these are the applications that will change the world
- vtomole 6y agoI work in this field. Quantum computers currently have no practical applications that outperform classical computers. Finding applications is currently an open research question whose answer mostly depends on how good the hardware gets over the next couple of years.
- elthor89 6y agoHow did you get into this field?
- vtomole 6y agoI contributed and (still do) to open quantum computing projects like Quantum Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Vtomole https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Vtomole, Cirq (https://github.com/quantumlib/Cirq https://github.com/quantumlib/Cirq) and Quantum Stack Exchange (https://quantumcomputing.stackexchange.com/users/362/victory-omole https://quantumcomputing.stackexchange.com/users/362/victory...). I'm happy to answer anymore questions you have!
- s1dev 6y agoMainly quantum simulation. The (most industrially relevant) dream is that you can do direct simulation of large, complicated molecules to better understand them. This is a place where the best understanding is that quantum computing is an exponential speed up although this is quite difficult to prove
- dekhn 6y agoNope! And it's entirely unclear when that's going to happen.
- somerandomboi 6y agoA question that ought to be asked is the relevancy of quantum computing through the perspective of the average user . Since its inception quantum computing has been an intellectual field grounded in academia. Unfortunately, much of the general population is not aware of the quantum computing's existence. In my argument, quantum computing need not be commercialized until it is further developed.
- neonate 6y agohttps://archive.is/FN2IQ https://archive.is/FN2IQ