> Is there any reason to think breakthroughs like this and similar could one day lead to quantum computers being applied to general computation? None whatsoeve

> Is there any reason to think breakthroughs like this and similar could one day lead to quantum computers being applied to general computation? None whatsoever. After learning a bit about them, I think of quantum computers as being a bit like GPUs: in theory you can do anything with them, but in practice, getting things done with them is hard enough that it’s best to use them for what they’re best for. You can certainly run classical algorithms on a quantum computer, but they probably wouldn’t perform any better than the equivalent on a classical computer; the only real advantage of quantum computers is that they let you run quantum algorithms to give you an exponential speedup on certain problems.