Comment by bawolff
5 hours ago
There is high agreement on what the real applications of Quantum computing are. Unfortunately these projects are basically useless when it comes to them.
5 hours ago
There is high agreement on what the real applications of Quantum computing are. Unfortunately these projects are basically useless when it comes to them.
Can you clarify? Do you mean that superconducting qubits are unable to perform the "real applications" theoretically, or that superconducting qubits at the scale this foundry could produce will be unable, or that superconducting qubits that will foundry could produce will still be outperformed by classical techniques?
I mean, we are no where near the scale [qubit count] & quality where the applications apply. Not just this foundry but in general. I suppose the point is to eventually get there, but we are not close yet.
You should still view anything Quantum as early R&D.
I don't have the same level of cynicism with quantum that I had with enterprise blockchain. (Hey, I spent a number of years getting sucked into things that didn't pan out along with some that did in a big way.) I pretty much agree with respect to quantum. Practical value is probably further away than a number of folks were betting on at one point though I still believe it's there.
1 reply →
> You should still view anything Quantum as early R&D.
The good thing is that someone who can make lots of chips can reduce the effort it takes to do R&D. With more people researching possible applications, it's likely we'll progress more quickly.
> There is high agreement on what the real applications of Quantum computing are.
and what are those applications?
The most obvious one is SIGINT agencies breaking RSA, DSA, ECDSA, ECDH, etc.
Of course, the plan is by the time quantum computers become capable of breaking those algorithms in practice, the industry will have moved to post-quantum cryptography algorithms.
But there will still be legacy systems which haven't, and also encrypted data recorded in the past in the expectation they'd be able to decrypt it in the future.
- better simultion of quantum systems (this is the actual important one despite nobody seeming to care)
- breaking a lot of traditional public key crypto (this gets a lot of attention, but its not that big a deal because there are alternatives)
- in theory i guess quadratic improvement on unstructured search. I think its unlikely to be practically relavent.