My question has to do with the comparisons that are being given for the difference in speed of computational power.
I keep hearing the example of a quantum computer solving a problem that would take our current best standard technology computer 1000000000000000etc years to solve.
My question is what was the problem that it was given to solve and is there any practical benefit to it being solved?
What’s the next BIG thing we’re going to have it do?
This is a genuine curiosity post.
Comments
The most straight-forward thing that a quantum computer could solve that would have a big impact in your daily life is prime factorization. Most of our computer security, like when logging into your bank or GMail or whatever – is based upon the fact that it takes a computer a long time to find the prime factors of really large numbers (if you want to read more about this, you can read up on public key cryptography, which is the umbrella term for most of the security we use today). However, quantum computers would be capable of solving that prime factorization very, very quickly.
However, there are a lot of quantum algorithms devleoped which are just waiting for quantum computers to come along. Some of the ones I think are cool are the ability to simulate the quantum interactions of larger collections of particles – which we could use for simulating protein folding which has potential health benefits, or some algorithms which allow us to solve (a subset of) equations needed for machine learning much, much quicker, which would allow larger, more powerful neural nets.
There is very few things which will be “brand new” because of quantum computers (well, at least that we know about now), but there are many things where we’ll be able to do things we do much, much quicker (like, instead of it taking 10,000 years, it’s done in a couple of seconds) using quantum computers.