I am at the Q2B (Quantum to Business) conference this week. Scott Aaronson is presenting the keynote today and talking about Quantum Supremacy.
There are specific examples of speedup quadratic and polynomial speedups on specific problems. There is no general speedup proven yet.
It is easier to measure the speedup on weird problems and specific cases.
The next presenter gives JP Morgan work working to apply quantum systems in finance. They are finding better robust examples of speedup.
Work in progress.
Brian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 Science News Blog. It covers many disruptive technology and trends including Space, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Medicine, Anti-aging Biotechnology, and Nanotechnology.
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GoatGuy here … thank you Brian for taking the effort and energy to put these slides up, and of course for attending the quantum supremacy / practicality conference.
My last set of questions was along the lines of “has quantum computing today been shown to solve any (class of) computationally hard problems in time T ideally much faster than, or at least on par with conventional algorithmic approaches?”
I think the gist of it is, “well, sort of… if you squint your eyes hard, and adopt a rather small universe of problems that are both hard, and nominally useful”.
And yes, along with the squinting is, “also, given how far along the State of the Art is, the results are still rather disappointingly weak as of this conference, BUT it looks like substantially larger and far more capable hardware has a roadmap for development that isn’t all that stretchy. Within the next 5 to 10 years.”
Oh sure, to someone having followed both quantum computing and power-by-fusion research, it inevitably comes to mind that this sounds awfully much like “we’re excited to project that powerful fusion is only about 20 years in the future, just as it has been for the last 40 years.”.
I know. Cynical. I am sorry.
My bet would be that the “error correction frameworks” will prove to be REALLY useful for scaling the size of quantum computer problem sets substantially. But also too, that they’re going to be beset with instabilities, not unlike the scaling of Fusion Plasmas in each of the last 6 decades.
Insurmountable? NO. Not at all.
Just remarkably tenacious, as if Mother Nature doesn’t really want us naked hominins figuring out either the power of the stars, or fully-remarkable quantum computing.
⋅-⋅-⋅ Just saying, ⋅-⋅-⋅
⋅-=≡ GoatGuy ✓ ≡=-⋅