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Comment by theonemind | Hacker News Reader

I don't think it'll happen tomorrow, but computer technology hasn't finished advancing...nor has our medical knowledge. Perhaps within the next century bits will turn out cheaper, faster, and more effective, perhaps even enabled by quantum computing. Biology seems massively parallel, and we've only just gotten started with parallelism in computing.

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That literally makes no sense. How exactly would a quantum computer assist us in simulating problems like drug transport and binding? (quite a few problems are purely empirically solved right now) How exactly is biology massively parallel? I suppose you could argue a cell is just a weird form of SIMD but that is a vast oversimplification. We’ve also been doing parallelism pretty much since computers were invented (and even before that, assembly lines were a thing) it’s just that now we really care cause our one trick of shoving transistors in doesn’t work so hot anymore.

A cell is a three dimensional environment where many weirdly shaped things interact with each other. It's not entirely unlike calculating a 3D video game. A quantum computer would assist us similarly as it helps in breaking encryption - it helps you search the problem space for a solution (e.g. protein shape) faster. Genomics is basically statistics.

| Genomics is basically statistics.

As someone in a bioinfomatics Ph.D., yes, there is statistics in genomic, but if you don't understand the underlying biology, you're going to be chasing wild statstical gooses. And even then, we sorta all treat our discoveries as temporary, needing wet lab work to help validate our claims. There's just something you cannot simulate.

I've never met a single person in my life that did or even thought anything worth a damn that wrote off complicated shit in the sort of blasse way people like you do. X is basically Y, why so complicated? It's easy to say everything is easy and simple when you're aware that you won't be contributing shit and more likely will be an annoyance to someone who will.

I didn't mean it's simple at all! but that most work is done using statistics.

> That literally makes no sense. How exactly would a quantum computer assist us in simulating problems like drug transport and binding?

You can use quantum computers to simulate quantum mechanical systems, such as ones studied in chemistry. https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1147/JRD.2018.2888987

Indeed, simulating quantum systems was the reason quantum computers were proposed by Feynman in the first place!

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