[ExI] Quantum computer advance

[john clark]

On Feb 20, 2012, at 3:33 PM, The Avantguardian wrote:

>   I read his wager but I am somewhat confused by what he means by "scaling".

Quantum Computers need not be perfect to give the correct answer because quantum error correction algorithms have been developed and the larger the computer the more error correction you can do, but if somebody could prove that as computers got larger the error rate would grow larger so fast that error correction could never keep up then we would know that Quantum Computers would never be practical and the problems they could solve would be small and dull, like finding the factors for the number 15 which Quantum Computers have already done, but that would just about be the limit of their ability. 

I would be rather surprised if that turned out to be the case because in a sense nature seems to have a way of making astronomically complex calculations very quickly, like figuring out how to fold up a very large protein. But who knows, I have been surprised before, I never expected that CERN would announce they have found something that moved faster than light. Incidentally I made a bet with a guy that FTL neutrinos would turn out to be real, he gave me 2 to 1 odds and there wasn't a lot of money involved so for fun I took the bet. We should know by the end of summer, maybe earlier if we're lucky. 


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