Comment by comicjk
3 days ago
Yes, in fact they might be useful for chemistry simulation long before they are useful for cryptography. Simulations of quantum systems inherently scale better on quantum hardware.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_computational_chemistr...
More recently it's turned out that quantum computers are less useful for molecular simulation than previously thought. See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pDj1QhPOVBo
The video is essentially an argument from the software side (ironically she thinks the hardware side is going pretty well). Even if the hardware wasn't so hard to build or scale, there are surprisingly few problems where quantum algorithms have turned out to be useful.
It is tough to beat classical computers. They work really well, and a huge amount of time (including some of mine) has gone into developing fast algorithms for them to do things they're not naturally fast at, such as quantum chemistry.
At 15:00, she says "quantum computers are surprisingly good at [...] quantum simulations [of electron behavior]", which would seem to contradict you.