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Little known fact: Simulating quantum physical systems was the original motivation for building quantum computers, because those simulations are infeasible with
by jlokier 4y ago
Little known fact: Simulating quantum physical systems was the original motivation for building quantum computers, because those simulations are infeasible without one, and someone figured out it would be, in principle, feasible to run those simulations using a computer based on quantum effects.
There's a neat symmetry to it. We can't be certain quantum computers work at useful scales, until we've built one, because there's no feasible way to simulate the physics of a useful size quantum computer without using one.
- jacobr1 4y ago> there's no feasible way to simulate the physics of a useful size quantum computer without using one. What do the diverging growth curves look like? We probably could brute force simulate the exponential states within a small-n using conventional computing, just by paying for more parallelism and time. At some point that doesn't scale (more computers needed than atoms on earth, for longer than the heat-death of the universe or whatever) but surely there are interesting problems we can model before whatever inflection point exists? If so - what kind of scale is that?