The end of science and progress?

Hi - welcome back!

Well remember that a Quantum Computer only acts to speed up certain kinds of calculations by putting some of the work into parallel using quantum superposition - in other words we are talking about the money and time needed to do a calculation. So unless the QC can achieve a substantial amount of parallelism, it will probably be cheaper to do the same operation with parallel conventional hardware.

The trouble is that systems that are in quantum superposition are very delicate.

David

Well i was never really gone, i still follow the forum a bit. Its just that most discussions start at a point much further than what i can agree with.

That is why i chimed in about quantum computing, it is a topic that is in full development.
I agree that QC will be very difficult, but that is no answer to the question i posed.
I have no idea which direction this is going, so i genuinely wonder what you would consider to be something useful?
 
Well i was never really gone, i still follow the forum a bit. Its just that most discussions start at a point much further than what i can agree with.

That is why i chimed in about quantum computing, it is a topic that is in full development.
I agree that QC will be very difficult, but that is no answer to the question i posed.
I have no idea which direction this is going, so i genuinely wonder what you would consider to be something useful?
My best hunch as an outsider, who at least somewhat understands the concept, is that it will get nowhere. The problem is that, as with so many things, the insiders can't be publicly pessimistic because their research money only keeps flowing if the end result appears feasible!

Looking at GOOGLE, GOOGLE itself claims to have built something with 72 qubits, but you have to consider whether those bits are fully coupled together (some earlier chips were not) and I really think sceptics would be needed to be allowed in to assess how real this claim is. For example, how long do these things manage to run for, and what is their error rate.

A qubit is roughly speaking a single bit of data held in a state where it is quantum mechanically coupled to all the other qubits. The whole evolves over time. However, a lot of things grow exponentially harder as you add more qubits, so it is hard to say how far this can go. Here is an easy to read article that gives you more of a flavour (I laughed at its title):

https://medium.com/@alearningaday/q...sition-of-optimism-and-pessimism-308afe55b7c4

I would guess it will go the same way as driverless cars. So if you ever see them driving through you neighbourhood in any numbers, you will know I was wrong!

If GC really worked, one of the first things would be that most encrypted messages would become vulnerable to being decrypted without the appropriate key.

David
 
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