「FISHING」# 3

. . . thinking about tools and technology . . .

〈Is quantum computing relevant to you?〉

 

 

Most people don't know what a potato is, chemically, physically, in any detail.
They don't need to know that.

What they do know about potatoes is what they can do with potatoes. That's usually enough.

They know that potatoes are edible if cooked. That boiling or frying is how to cook them. That potatoes are carbohydrates when eaten. (Maybe not even that!)

If you were told the atomic structure of a potato, without having the other knowledge required to infer from that structure what can be done with the potato, you too would still be confused regarding the potato, if you were not born with any special intuition about how to think about it. It just so happens we are not born with special intuition about the abstract. But if you knew what can be done with a potato, what it does, then learning what it is is much less difficult.

Most people don't understand quantum computing, because they don't know what it basically does, compared with classical computing, and what, therefore, it can do. Memorizing the details of symbolism or buzzwords isn't very illuminating without this general behavioral information. Once you know what it does basically, however, learning what it is becomes easier: what something does and what it is are intimately connected.

So. Ought you be interested in quantum computing? That depends on what else interests you.

Most computer scientists are not particularly interested in quantum computing, not really. For example, Ivan Sutherland (former technical head of ARPA) indicating on a panel he was not impressed. He's right. Why?

Basically, quantum computing works by turning quantum mechanical uncertainty of outcome into uncertainty of time until outcome, but with certain statistics of outcome. Hence often talk of weak measurements here. So quantum mechanics can be used to compute, much more slowly on average, with much higher precision, in a much larger phase space.

Is that faster or slower than present chips? Depends.

Classical, electrical computers are faster in the sense of performing more computations per unit time. However what they are doing is relatively not very precise. (And further precision is increasingly costly. See the Nvidia Tesla card, one might say.)

For code breaking much fewer much higher precision operations are more useful than many more lower precision ones. It's the reverse for just about all other use cases. Greg Bear had a fun short story about quantum computing but that's science fiction, not science. (2015, ``The Machine Starts'', Future Visions, New York, Microsoft.)

For most consumer or business applications, you would much rather have very many low precision but error corrected operations, preferably asynchronously, rather than significantly fewer significantly higher precision ones.

Why is so much written about quantum computing and why is everyone excited?

They aren't. Many people just pretend to work on it.

Unknown to most nonacademics, the funding for mathematicians and physicists, today, if any, mostly comes from a certain three letter agency (and various friends). That comes under the premise of working on quantum computers. Most academics are very smart ... and very poor ... compared to how rich they must be ... if they were to pay for equipment and space and assistants. (PhD also stands for Poor, Helpless, and Desperate.)

Most of them are just scientists working on basic physics or mathematics. (For example, Bob Coecke, who has an excellent new book out representative of the work.) However, asking for funding to work on basic physics or mathematics is futile. You'll get five grand grants, which is cute. Governments won't fund basic science in any big way anymore. They realized thirty years ago that there's nothing really in it for them. While many researchers are loath to admit this I just don't care :)

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I'll do a post later about how it works in detail. I need to figure out a good workflow for getting mathematics quickly up on Steemit.

!busy !creativity !science !originalworks !macrophotography !photography !scifi !blog !writing

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