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My prediction would be that it won't become mainstream. Even if it will be practically possible to build quantum computers for average users (given they curren
by hannob 4mo ago
My prediction would be that it won't become mainstream.
Even if it will be practically possible to build quantum computers for average users (given they currently rely on complex physical experiments, one can doubt that), there's the question of whether there's a need for "mainstream" quantum computing.
As has often been said, quantum computers aren't some magical thing that makes every computation faster. They are faster at some very specific problems like breaking cryptography (I doubt that there's a mass market for decrypting the old WIFI traffic you stored from your neighbor, and, these days, most internet traffic is already pq safe) and simulating physics (also probably not something average joe wants to do every day).
In all likelihood, quantum computers will be specialized devices used, e.g., by scientists. You may be able to rent your quantum computing time if that gets cheap enough to be practical, but I doubt many people will ever own one.
- retube 4mo agoI am reminded of Alexander Bell - one day every city in America will have a telephone!
- trick-or-treat 4mo ago640 qubits ought to be enough for anybody.
- razakel 4mo ago>You may be able to rent your quantum computing time if that gets cheap enough to be practical, but I doubt many people will ever own one. You already can rent time on one - IBM and others offer it - but they are not cheap.
- XajniN 4mo agoThey are not cheap, but at least they are useless.
- echoangle 4mo ago> simulating physics (also probably not something average joe wants to do every day) Maybe this will be used for video games at some point? Saying that this will never happen feels a bit like what people were saying about computers when they were filling rooms and cost a fortune, and now everyone has a few of them and finds a lot of uses for them.
- yorwba 4mo agoIt's possible to simulate the classical physics of fairly large game worlds using fairly small classical computer. If you wanted to model it using quantum physics instead (where quantum computers would theoretically have an advantage) said computer would need so many qubits that it would be much larger than the world it's supposed to simulate, while the additional realism would be essentially imperceptible to the player. You'd be better off using analog computing by putting a telepresence robot inside a real-world game arena.
- echoangle 4mo ago> It's possible to simulate the classical physics of fairly large game worlds using fairly small classical computer. Not really, almost everything is faked and not really a physics sim. Imagine a world like GTA but every material has realistic deformation and destruction. I’m not saying quantum computers would be able to do that, but it’s not like current video games are at a point where more compute wouldn’t improve them.
- tripledry 4mo ago> while the additional realism would be essentially imperceptible to the player Personally for me this is the relevant part. I can ofc imagine some niche games like Kerbal Space Program with complete realism, but I'm not convinced it makes it more enjoyable to play. Would be interesting to see for sure.
- SonOfLilit 4mo agoQuantum computers help simulate the unintuitive parts of physics, not those that feel natural to humanst and therefore make sense to include in a game.
- dr_dshiv 4mo agoCheck out https://quantumvibecoding.org https://quantumvibecoding.org if you want to run some circuits via Claude or codex.
- himata4113 4mo agoAny kind of quantum workload would live in servers since their capabilities will likely never be latency sensitive. I think what is more interesting is finding a way to utilize the fact that quantum information is capable of traveling faster than the speed of light, obviously observation of the data is bound the same limitations as we have today, but we could scale bandwidth by encoding data and "teleporting" it to the destination greatly increasing throughput, you can think of it as infinite compression. Even more interesting would be to genuinely understand why our universe is able to bind particles like that though since right we know it happens and we can observe it, but we don't really know why or even if it travels faster than the speed of light, but rather we are simply surfacing a derandomized value. This is pretty hard to explain, but if we follow the many-worlds theory we're simply observing an artifact that if we observe value B in the future, we are simply from a universe that had the value B to begin with which means the information never needed to travel at light speed, it was always there. I think we will find quantum going mainstream in places we least expect, mostly based around derandomization and amplification of data throughput rather than any kind of compute.
- luma 4mo agoNo quantum process currently known allows for information transfer faster than the speed of light.
- himata4113 4mo agoWasn't the entire conflict behind entanglement that it appeared to have the capability to violate this princible with the only two explanations being: quantum state travels faster than the speed of light or we're in a many-worlds universe where state propagates backwards which means the information was there from the very beginning?
- luma 4mo agoThe key word here is "information". No known quantum effect results in information being transferred faster than the speed of light (which might be more correctly known these days as a the speed limit of information). Entanglement, even at great distance, does not violate this principle as that cannot be effectively used to transfer information.