But you still believe that quantum computers have a likelihood of being possible to build AND that they can accomplish a task faster than classical? I feel like it’s going to get exponentially harder and expensive to get very small incremental gains and that actually beating a classical computer isn’t necessarily feasible (because of all the error correction involved and difficulty in manufacturing a computer with large number of qbits). Happy to be proven wrong of course.
> But you still believe that quantum computers have a likelihood of being possible to build AND that they can accomplish a task faster than classical?
Not GP but yes. I'm reasonably confident that we will have quantum computers that are large and stable enough to have a real quantum advantage, but that's mostly because I believe Moore's law is truly dead and we will see a plateau in 'classical' CPU advancement and memory densities.
> I feel like it’s going to get exponentially harder and expensive to get very small incremental gains and that actually beating a classical computer isn’t necessarily feasible (because of all the error correction involved and difficulty in manufacturing a computer with large number of qbits)
I don't think people appreciate or realize that a good chunk of the innovations necessary to "get there" with quantum are traditional (albeit specialized) engineering problems, not new research (but breakthroughs can speed it up). I'm a much bigger fan of the "poking lasers at atoms" style of quantum computer than the superconducting ones for this reason, the engineering is more like building cleaner lasers and better AOMs [0] than trying to figure out how to super cool vats of silicon and copper. It's outside my area of expertise, but I would expect innovations to support better lithography to also benefit these types of systems, though less directly than superconducting.
Source: I worked on hard-realtime control systems for quantum computers in the past. Left because the academic culture can be quite toxic.
I don’t know how people claim the science is solved and “it’s just engineering” when scaling up to no trivial quantum circuits is literally the problem no one has solved and hand waving it away as an “engineering problem” seems really disingenuous. Foundational science needs to be done to solve these problems.
Classical CPUs have slowed but not stopped but more importantly quantum machines haven’t even been built yet let alone been proven possible to scale up arbitrarily. Haven’t even demonstrated they can factor 17 faster than a classical computer.
