[ExI] Quantum Supremacy

[John Clark]

On Sun, Sep 22, 2019 at 9:36 PM Brent Allsop via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

> Quantum Computers are not “Turing complete” right?  Can they do ALL
> crypto hash guessing fast?  Some hash algorithms are way different than
> others.  Some requiring lots of memory, for example.  Can they do any kind
> of tensor flow stuff all the AI chips do these days?...
>

Quantum Computers are Turing complete, they can do everything a
conventional computer can do, but they might not be faster at everything.
Today we know they're faster at predicting what a physical system will do,
like how a amino acid sequence will fold up, and faster at cracking all
public encryption methods that use factoring numbers as RSA does or
Elliptic-curve cryptography as Bitcoin does. Quantum Computers are also
faster at search; if you were searching a old fashioned telephone book with
a million entries trying to find a name to go with a telephone number you
had then you would on average have to go through 500,000 operations before
you found a match but a Quantum Computer would only need 1,000, its the
difference between N/2 and the square root of N.  They're also faster at
finding the optimal solution to complex scheduling problems.

They can probably do lots of other things faster too but we can't really
test what the limits of Quantum Computers are until we have one and can
play around with it, I think it's sorta like how we were with conventional
computers in the late 1940s.

 John K Clark
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