Quantum computers: what are they good for?

[John Clark]

Some interesting quotations from this Nature article:

"The short-term hype is a bit high, but the long-term hype is nowhere near enough.”

 “If anything is going to give something useful in the next five years, it will be chemistry calculations, That’s because of the relatively low resource requirements. This would be possible using quantum computers with a relatively small number of qubits” 

Quantum computers: what are they good for?

John K Clark    See what's on my new list at  Extropolis

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[Brent Meeker]

That was one of the original motivations for QC, protein folding.  But ironically there have now been developed fast classical algorithms that do protein folding.  This illustrates that there is no proof that QC is necessarily faster than the fastest of all possible classical algorithms.

Brent

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[John Clark]

On Thu, May 25, 2023 at 5:38 PM Brent Meeker <meeke...@gmail.com> wrote:

> That was one of the original motivations for QC, protein folding.  But ironically there have now been developed fast classical algorithms that do protein folding.  This illustrates that there is no proof that QC is necessarily faster than the fastest of all possible classical algorithms.

Yes nobody has proved it, nevertheless nearly every mathematician thinks it's true and quantum computers can do things that conventional computers can't. My intuition tells me the same thing, now that we know for sure that what Einstein called "spooky action at a distance " is real it seems to me there must be some way to put this interesting scientific phenomenon to work to our technological advantage. And quantum computers do that but conventional computers do not.  

By the way, there is a new result that does not prove a quantum computer could solve all nondeterministic polynomial time problems in polynomial time BUT it does PROVE  that even if P=NP and even if we had an algorithm that could solve NP problems on a conventional computer in polynomial time there would STILL be a class of problems that a conventional computer could NOT solve efficiently but a quantum computer COULD.  Although I must admit that this is a class of very exotic problems that were recently discovered that may be of fundamental interest in themselves or they may be interesting for no reason other than that a conventional computer can’t solve them but a quantum computer can. This is so recent nobody knows yet.

Oracle Separation of BQP and PH

John K Clark    See what's on my new list at  Extropolis

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