views:

326

answers:

7

I have recently been web-researching quantum computing.

Will we see these in our lifetimes (ever?) (The error correction issue, for example, seems intractable to me).

+1  A: 

I vote: Hype.

...but hope I'm wrong.

Randy

Randy Stegbauer
Why do people sign their posts like a personal letter? lol.. We can see who it is at the bottom of the post ;)
Simucal
Well...because it seems more personal.
Randy Stegbauer
A: 

Quantum computing is a tool; it's just a tool too raw to have any sort of useful application as of this moment, but who knows.

millenomi
+2  A: 

It's already here, just with very limited uses so far.

Brian Knoblauch
A: 

Nobody will ever need more than 640KB of RAM...

... okay fine. Maybe he didn't say that but you get the idea. :)

Mat Nadrofsky
+1  A: 

Quantum computing isn't much past the "idea" stage. Sure, they can multiply two 2-bit integers, but it takes a dozen grad students a week to set up for the run, and another week to validate the results.

Long-term it's probably got a lot of potential, though it may never be stable enough for use outside of a highly controlled lab-based "supercomputer" environment.

At this point I'd classify it more as Physics than Computer Science. In a way, it's as if Charles Babbage got his hands on one of Michael Faraday's papers and started thinking about maybe, possibly, someday, being able to use electromagnetism as a basis for calculation.

There's been a fair amount written about Quantum Computing over the last couple of years in Scientific American, much of it by the primary researchers themselves: http://www.sciam.com

Clayton
+2  A: 

Error correction and loss of coherence are the big problems in quantum computing, as I understand it. Lots of smart people are hard at work on solving these problems, but last I read, it was looking like error-correction requirements might be exponential over the number of qbits, which really detracts from the "we'll solve NP problems in an instant!" attraction of quantum computation.

Mark Bessey