[colesantiago]

Graphs aren't telling me anything.

What are the real world use cases now, today? The only thing I see in the QC space, are QC stocks and funding paying for the employment of scientific experimentation, which isn't a real world application.

Do I have to wait 15 to 30 years for a series of real world changing breakthroughs that I can already do on a NVIDIA GPU card?

That doesn't exponential at all, in fact that sounds very very bearish.

[kevlened]

> The only thing I see in the QC space, are QC stocks and funding paying for the employment of scientific experimentation

Then invest accordingly, and later reinvest your winnings in a different direction.

[vtomole]

The graphs aren't telling you that QC hardware is not improving at a super-exponential pace?

There are no real world use cases today. The hardware is not advanced enough yet, but it's improving exponentially.

[iinnPP]

I think the point being made is that the graphs don't show real world applications progress. Being 99.9999999% or 0.000001% of the way to a useful application could be argued as no progress given the stated metric. Is there a guarantee that these things can and will work given enough time?

[vtomole]

> Is there a guarantee that these things can and will work given enough time?

Quantum theory predicts that they will work given enough time. If they don't work, there is something about physics that we are missing.

[zarzavat]

Quantum theory says that quantum computers are mathematically plausible. It doesn't say anything about whether it's possible to construct a quantum computer in the real world of a given configuration. It's entirely possible that there's a physical limit that makes useful quantum computers impossible to construct.

[vtomole]

Quantum theory says that quantum computers are physically plausible. Quantum theory lies in the realm of physics, not mathematics. As a physical theory, it makes predictions about what is plausible in the real world. One of those predictions is that it's possible to build a large-scale fault tolerant quantum computer.

The way to test out this theory is to try out an experiment to see if this is so. If this experiment fails, we'll have to figure out why theory predicted it but the experiment didn't deliver.

[zarzavat]

> One of those predictions is that it's possible to build a large-scale fault tolerant quantum computer.

Quantum theory doesn't predict that it's possible to build a large scale quantum computer. It merely says that a large scale quantum computer is consistent with theory.

Dyson spheres and space elevators are also consistent with quantum theory, but that doesn't mean that it's possible to build one.

Physical theories are subtractive, something that is consistent with the lowest levels of theory can still be ruled out by higher levels.

[Dylan16807]

> The way to test out this theory is to try out an experiment to see if this is so. If this experiment fails, we'll have to figure out why theory predicted it but the experiment didn't deliver.

If "this experiment" is trying to build a machine, then failure doesn't give much evidence against the theory. Most machine-building failures are caused by insufficient hardware/engineering.

[pohl]

Sounds like a pursuit where we win either way

[stocksinsmocks]

Publishing findings that amount to an admission that you and others spent a fortune studying a dead end is career suicide and guarantees your excommunication from the realm of study and polite society. If a popular theory is wrong, some unlucky martyr must first introduce incontrovertible proof and then humanity must wait for the entire generation of practitioners whose careers are built on it to die.

[vtomole]

Quantum theory is so unlikely to be wrong that if large-scale fault tolerant quantum computers could not be built, the effort to try to build them will not be a dead end, but instead a revolution in physics.

[ziofill]

Unless the overall cost is too high, but yes it's definitely worth pursuing as far as we currently know.