[FRIAM] In the coldness of space...

[Marcus Daniels]

< b) a Big question is whether a quantum computer algorithm will be found to solve problems like the travelling salesman problem efficiently. To keep this post simple I'm not going into computational complexity theory, I'll just give the conclusion:
If a quantum computer algorithm is developed to solve a problem like the travelling salesman problem efficiently then it will also be able to solve many other real world problems (NP-complete problems) efficiently and that will have a huge positive impact on the world. (This is of course also provided point 1 above is met)   >

Recognizing the validity of complexity class arguments, the equivalences made between very different kinds of problems are amazing to me, assuming things like that scaling is easy and that error correction will be fast.    The literature on quantum algorithms largely assumes error corrected qubits.  Meanwhile, there’s the possibility of larger, noisier, abstraction-free systems that are more suited to quantum chemistry type problems.   Those could also have a big impact, but it would not be in the same ways classical computers have had an impact.

Marcus
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