Commercialising Quantum Computers | Hacker News Reader

Commercialising Quantum Computers

economist.com

14 pointsprostoalex17 comments

A question that ought to be asked is the relevancy of quantum computing through the perspective of the average user . Since its inception quantum computing has been an intellectual field grounded in academia. Unfortunately, much of the general population is not aware of the quantum computing's existence. In my argument, quantum computing need not be commercialized until it is further developed.

Well, you would have to demonstrate a problem space where the faster solve was worth the higher cost. Does that exist yet?

For example, at an air operator company, if you can calculate optimal schedule of plane flights so you fly as least miles as possible, you can make millions daily.

Right, but it's not possible now, is it?

Downscaled version is possible with the quantum computers of today, if that's what you mean.

Optimization is done today - manually.

This is a travelling salesman problem. It's true that a conventional computer cannot truly solve this problem for large size inputs because it is NP-hard. Whether the inputs for an actual scheduled aviation company are large enough to make this important I somewhat doubt, but regardless:

We have good heuristics for this problem which are very close to the likely best solution. So instead of an amazing pay off for a true solution you get in fact only a slight improvement or worse in some cases merely confirmation that your existing heuristic answer was actually the best possible.

Could you please point me to some of these alternative solutions?

Classical computers might not find the optimal schedule but can likely solve for good enough scheduling for a fraction of the price. I’m curious if the difference would result in millions daily for a single air operator company

Quantum computers don’t have such a compelling case for optimization. Classical optimization algorithms are really good. Usually if you look hard enough you can find a sqrt(n) speed up but I don’t think these are the applications that will change the world

I work in this field. Quantum computers currently have no practical applications that outperform classical computers. Finding applications is currently an open research question whose answer mostly depends on how good the hardware gets over the next couple of years.

How did you get into this field?

I contributed and (still do) to open quantum computing projects like Quantum Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Vtomole, Cirq (https://github.com/quantumlib/Cirq) and Quantum Stack Exchange (https://quantumcomputing.stackexchange.com/users/362/victory...).

I'm happy to answer anymore questions you have!

Mainly quantum simulation. The (most industrially relevant) dream is that you can do direct simulation of large, complicated molecules to better understand them. This is a place where the best understanding is that quantum computing is an exponential speed up although this is quite difficult to prove

Nope! And it's entirely unclear when that's going to happen.

https://archive.is/FN2IQ

The analogy is like crypto currency, it is even harder to understand and use than that for most people.

Cryptocurrency is supposed to be used by regular people (and that's how it gets money, basically as a pyramid scheme). Quantum computers are supposed to be used for a certain class of problems where it can do better than classical computers. So I'd say it's a significantly different domain and it doesn't really matter that most people don't understand it because it's a very specialized use case.

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