from Hacker News

Ask HN: Thoughts on quantum computing?

by akg on 3/25/13, 2:15 PM with 2 comments

Are there any prevalent criticisms/enthusiasms for the current trajectory of the commercial availability of quantum computing? Naturally, there has been a large amount of research effort and funding devoted to advancing quantum computing, Lockheed-Martin being one of it's major advocators.

Is this an up and coming area that developers should start focusing their efforts on? How does this compete/complement with the current "trend" of massive parallelization?

  • by claudius on 3/25/13, 2:29 PM

    Parallelisation and QC are mostly orthogonal in that you don’t need QC to do parallelisation properly and most of QC can be done with the current state of classical parallelisation. I would also not suggest working on QC as a software developer just yet, given that QC theory is far more advanced than QC hardware already.

    Nevertheless, what certainly is worth working on and an area that unfortunately does not get as much attention as I would prefer is ‘QC-safe’ classical encryption, i.e. encryption schemes implementable on classical computers that cannot be easily cracked by QC. Otherwise we’re just waiting for someone to build a QC and set up a website ‘Upload a public key here and get the private key via email’.

  • by Jonovono on 3/25/13, 6:04 PM

    I am curious if anyone could comment on what QC could mean in terms of AI/NLP.