First quantum computers need smart software
nature.com
nature.com
However the difficulty of scaling quantum computers goes up exponentially with the number of qubits, thus we may not achieve enough success to make them practical.
Well, since you mentioned this: would you mind linking me to a single demonstration of it that has been conclusively established as evidence of quantum computing? I've seen lots of D-Wave stuff but to my knowledge the experts don't actually really buy those.
> However the difficulty of scaling quantum computers goes up exponentially with the number of qubits, so we might not achieve enough success to make them practical.
But yes, this is more in line with what I was thinking. Even if it's possible I don't expect it will be practical (hence why I used this word in the earlier comment).
I mean physics is quantum. At least, the interface between our experimental apparatuses and the micro world demonstrates all the expected speedups. Every known experiment backs this up.
http://m.pnas.org/content/114/13/3305.full
Supposedly ~17 qubit devices are on the way. None has demonstrated quantum supremacy, practical or not.
That's exactly what I mean. I haven't seen any evidence of quantum computing being demonstrated. All I know is it's hypothetically possible. I'm not sure what people were downvoting when I said this, I'm just stating a fact. It's not like I wished it wouldn't happen or something.
If quantum computing turns out to be impossible, and not just because engineering is hard, that would need a great and exciting new theory. Perhaps more exciting than quantum computing would have been.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_quantum_computing
Looks like the state of the art is 17-qbits, what leads us to numbers slightly larger than 100000.
2000: Computers with 5 and 7 bits of memory.
2006: 12 bits of memory
2011: 14 bits
2017: 17 bits
There is too little data to suggest anything else than a linear fit. But then again, the early stages of exponential, or logarithmic, growth can look linear. We should wait 10-20 years to get more data.
2017 - 17 qbits
2011 - 14 qbits
2006 - 12 qbits
2000 - 7 qbits
Quantum computers have the same barriers as other private space technology. The question to me is how long they will take to go from research toys to hobby toys which has a lot to do with cost and something to do with consumer safety.
A better example might be artificial intelligence and the AI winters. Like the failure of machine translation despite high hopes in the 1960s. It took us some 50 years to get to where we are now with Google Translate, and it still only works well for some languages. I have no idea how close to human accuracy it will get, so I would neither be surprised if it never does, nor if it does someday.
Anyway, hopefully instead of picking on the particular examples you can see that my point is obviously that people imagined we'd have a lot of things now that we still don't have the technology for today. So the fact that we've done amazing things in certain areas doesn't really say anything regarding this particular issue.
And there's plenty of things that people said were impossible that were achieved.
That doesn't tell us anything regarding quantum computing, either.
Looking at what people said about past things is completely irrelevant to the prospects for some particular potential technology. The only way you can try to judge the prospects for that technology is by actually getting into the details of that technology and how it relates to our current understanding of the world.
Exactly. That was never my reasoning either so I'm not sure what you're refuting.
What you seem to be asking is whether the technology will become mainstream, which is different from your earlier question.
I'm not sure: https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=3192
> I replied that, even though we’ve by now been around this carousel several times, I felt like the ball was now firmly in the D-Wave skeptics’ court, to reproduce the observed performance classically. And if, after a year or so, no one could, that would be a good time to start taking seriously that a D-Wave speedup might finally be here to stay—and to move on to the next question, of whether this speedup had anything to do with quantum computation, or only with the building of a piece of special-purpose optimization hardware.
Maybe not at the end of this year, but very soon, quantum supremacy will be claimed by one of companies that are developing a quantum computer similar to the d-wave computer used by Google and others. That is sort a single purpose computer that can only be used to perform a very limited set of work loads, but it still qualifies as a quantum computer, but will most like be a very limited in what it can do and how useful it will be.
A few years later you will see quantum supremacy be claimed by one the companies trying to build a general purpose quantum computer like Microsoft. It is first then the quantum revolution will take off.
It wasn't named with political correctness in mind; but the naming makes sense from a technical point of view.