How important will quantum computing be?
@urusan
Every important thing becomes world changing eventually via accretion of progress (for eg. the quantum simulations QC enables would likely lead to some amazing tech), but on a relative scale I vote at the Important level
@urusan
I was surprised to hear Stephen Wolfram say on a podcast that it likely won't work. It's not an opinion we hear very often, but falsifiable predictions like this are nice to have.
@digital_carver That's interesting, any idea where (and when) he said this?
Some of his recent work suggested to me that quantum computers would be even more important than most people think.
@urusan
In Sean Carroll's Mindscape podcast https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0bMYtEKjHs0
Full context starts at 01:22:32
> it seems that you can never win with quantum computing, that is that when you branch out in all these different ways, the effort to corral things back together is at least as great as the gain that you get from things branching apart.
(at 01:26:15 in the YouTube video)
@urusan
There's also a transcript at https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2021/07/12/155-stephen-wolfram-on-computation-hypergraphs-and-fundamental-physics/ (which is where I copied the quote from), though the timestamps are slightly different for some reason
@digital_carver Very interesting.
It's pretty bold for him to make this prediction right now, as some of the biggest quantum computers have supposedly surpassed classical computers on specific problems.
That said, there is still pretty scant evidence for quantum computers outperforming classical computers, as it's all in big labs and with lots of caveats. It could also currently be due to those computers being much better performing when used correctly, but would eventually hit limits