Chad Rigetti on Building Quantum Computers [video]
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It's unclear today if quantum computers will be useful, just as it was unclear in 1962 if supercomputers for large scientific numerical calculations would be useful. It'll be interesting to see.
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I haven't seen anything to suggest that there's big problems out there waiting to be solved by powerful computing capabilities. Has anyone else found something that suggests there's active problems waiting for quantum computers?
I've always found the missing thing in life saving pharmaceuticals is sick people to test compounds on.
Nonetheless, good to see YC pushing the envelope on impactful stuff.
I hope they desperately bring some inorganic and organic chemists with 10+ years of experience. It would open a new can of ventures that are meaningful. The good problems, the great ones, are in chemistry.
Biology simply isn't that discrete. It's like 4000 years of spaghetti code.
I also was very surprised by that. I think it's probably 98% hype and 2% truth. There might be cases where the better understanding of physics brought by QC will impact a better understanding of biology. But I'd be very surprised if that made a big impact.
> I've always found the missing thing in life saving pharmaceuticals is sick people to test compounds on.
I don't think that's the case either. I think people who have a life-threatening illness are pretty willing to take part in trials. What I'd rather think is that likely the most important thing is to apply stricter scientific standards. Pharma companies have been complaining that they can't replicate the vast majority of pre-clinical cancer studies. The pharma companies themselves are also guilty of skewing research by hiding results and not sharing data. That's the thing that's holding up research. There's too much crappy science that wastes resources.
Finding someone with the perfect storm of conditions is really really tough.
The problem is that all the studies really have to be n=1 and the hunt for drug targets is now the hunt for the black swan.
The problem is massively intractable. QC could revolutionize the space.
Unger and Moult (1993) have shown a three-dimensional protein folding model to be NP-complete, and a two- and three-dimensional mathematical model describing the folding process as a free energy minimization problem is NP-hard: