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by seydor
1381 days ago
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How did this come about? I think it's a very simple case of misunderstanding and overpromising. There are many interdisciplinary fields that mesh with computation. We have DNA computers and neural turing machines. QC is a subfield of quantum mechanics, one of many with some interesting applications but nothing shows that it has open-ended potential to revolutionize computation. But, it has the word 'computation' in it , and in the past decades the VCs with most money come from computer science. So you have a combination of Quantum (spoooky, mysterious) with computation (that one i know). I never got why QC was seen as so promising, it's an interesting exercise on paper but is not the 2nd coming of anything. Wish that money had gone to fusion instead, that one we understand now more than ever, that it has very real positive consequences |
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Well, we do know that P <= BQP <= PSCPACE, and we have one important example that lies in BQP but not in P (for all we know). It's just not clear how important that particular example is for the kind of computing we do today, if it ever becomes practical. It looks like it'd rather result in a one-time nuisance for sysadmins, like Y2K was.
The hope was for applications in new areas like materials and drug design. The author has posted a link to one paper suggesting that we might not see exponential speedups in chemical simulations, but that's not an outright refutation either.