[monstertank]

I know this is cool technology...but can someone give me some use cases? Like I'm not super sure how speed or more qbits factor into whatever these computers are supposed to do.

I could research it, but someone here probably has a nice simple explanation that will be good enough.

[tux3]

The main use-case is giving the first organization that can build a really big one the ability to break most existing encryption on the Internet, forcing us to migrate to post-quantum crypto.

There are really very few other applications at the moment. It's actually a well-known and very hard challenge to try to find interesting tasks where quantum algorithms beat classical ones. Experts have spent much effort trying to come up with one of these, and nigh invariably another expert comes back some time after with a classical algorithm that is just as fast as the quantum one on the same task.

[fragmede]

This is 5,000 gates, but to practically break a 4k RSA key, you'd need millions of gates, so we're still a long way away. Still, you could record my RSA-encrypted conversation today, and decrypt it in, say, 50 years. Shor hope I haven't said anything too incriminating!

[prennert]

There are some applications listed here: https://www.ibm.com/quantum/blog/qiskit-functions-catalog .

[EvgeniyZh]

I'm condensed matter theory PhD student and my research is close but not directly related to quantum computing.

There are some usecases for quantum computers and we are pretty sure that QCs are able to do stuff classical ones can't, but it is somewhat limited. In fact there is xprize to think of some applications [1].

You can separate usecases by whether they require fault tolerance. Fault tolerance is still very far away, and even single fault tolerant qubit (error rate of say 10^(-14)) would take a lot time from now, leave alone thousands/millions of them. We only had working error correction (i.e., error corrected qubit having lower error rate than physical one) this August [2] and it's still not better if you take into account the error correction overhead. Challenges include scaling manufacturing, control, cooling, etc.

Without fault tolerance you're into what's called NISQ (noisy intermediate scale quantum) where you just deal with errors instead of correcting them. As for now I guess we are in thousands of total gates we can apply before noise kills us. Maybe 10000 in the very very best case. Moreover the currently leading approach, superconducting qubits (Google, IBM), have fixed connectivity and applying gate on two disconnected qubits have additional overhead. Alternative approaches (Quantinuum's ion, QuEra cold atoms) don't have these limitations but have others.

The killer application for NISQ, in my opinion, are quantum simulations, i.e. simulations of quantum systems with quantum computers. Our ability to simulate quantum systems are fairly limited by the exponential growth of the state space, and smarter algorithms have their limitations, and you always simplify the model significantly. There may be some insights in simulating more complicated models. One obvious use for that is chemistry, but classical chemical algorithms are very well developed and classical computers are huge compared to quantum ones. Also chemical simulations require relatively deep circuits (N^3 scaling I believe), which is the main limitation of NISQ. Simulations for physical models (say, Hubbard model) are probably easier, but using this to justify billions spent would be hard. These applications in my opinion are pretty close (a number of years) to the moment you have real advantage (i.e., solve a problem in this domain nobody can solve classically), but this is optimistic opinion.

There are also applications for which the advantage may be there but we are not sure. Optimization is one example, though I think optimization on classical data will never close the vast resource gap (we have trillions of transistors in classical clusters vs hunders of qubits), even if there is advance. Optimization on quantum data probably is better on quantum computers, but again, not much pressing problems there.

For the fully fault tolerant the best known example is factorization. It is definitely better complexity then any algorithm we have classically, good enough to expect realistically sized QC one day will beat any classical computer. That said, while this has clear consequences from security standpoint, breaking some cryptography schemes it not exactly the most exciting thing IMHO, and people will switch to post quantum crypto way before (there was a recent work that could break existing PQC, but there was a bug in it [3]). There is Grover's algorithm for search but I doubt practical advantages there.

All in all it may sound a bit pessimistic, but I think if the technology arrives people will figure out how to use it.

[1] https://www.xprize.org/prizes/qc-apps [2] https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.13687 [3] https://eprint.iacr.org/2024/555

[signalToNose]

So it’s mainly a science and engineering challenge that may or maybe not have any practical application. Quite similar to manned space missions and even bigger particle accelerators etc. The diminishing returns on these mega projects will strain the public’s support both financially and politically. James Webb telescope was a huge success. But many other projects have not resulted in much either science or business.

[piva00]

Which is just the nature of exploration in science and engineering, we can't know what lies ahead before exploring a domain... If we could we probably wouldn't need ever to explore anything because we would have discovered how to predict the future.

Or how do you expect pushing the edges of our knowledge to work?

[EvgeniyZh]

All large-scale quantum computers are private; they technically do not need public support. I'd argue that having moonshot projects is a net positive for society, and I'm really happy that Google, for example, invests a non-trivial amount of money in them.

[chr1]

The main benefit of building quantum computer is verification of correctness of quantum mechanics. There is a good reason to hope that quantum computers won't work allowing us to create better theory.

[EvgeniyZh]

What is that reason? Quantum mechanics is a well-established theory with multiple experimental confirmations, but also quantum computers already work.

[chr1]

Newtonian mechanics also was a well established theory with multiple confirmations, but that did not mean the predictions it made were exact.

Shor's algorithm working for large numbers would rule out some of interpretations of quantum mechanics like objective collapse, something that have not happened yet.

In any case my argument was not about any particular interpretation of quantum mechanics, my argument is that building quantum computer allows us to test our understanding of physics in conditions where it have not been tested yet. And so even if that did not produce any additional benefits the testing itself would be worthwhile.

[moffkalast]

Eventually destroying privacy on a societal level by making most standard encryption methods useless would be one.