I wasn't able to dig up too much, but the introduction to a paper [1] by some Google folks provides a bit of insight into what might be possible:
> In particular, quantum simulation of molecular energies, which enables numerically exact prediction of chemical reaction rates, promises significant advances in our understanding of chemistry and could enable in silico design of new catalysts, pharmaceuticals, and materials.
[1] https://journals.aps.org/prx/pdf/10.1103/PhysRevX.6.031007
edit: link to talk
http://longnow.org/seminars/02016/aug/09/quantum-computer-re...
That's a bit like insurance: Your house hasn't burned down yet. Great, here is another insurance premium for you.
No.
In reality so-called quantum cryptography is completely impractical. Imagine an Internet where you can't send messages to people more than a few hundred kilometers away, with no wifi and no mobile Internet and which only works if you have pre-shared keys. That's the Quantum Internet (which apparently the EU just decided to fund with billions).
> No. In reality so-called quantum cryptography is completely impractical
What about building quantum safe protocols? Is that as a field any more interesting and/or viable?
Yes. Plenty of stuff happening in that field.
The challenge is: Right now we can choose between probably safe, but impractical (mcbits, sphincs) and practical, but with big questionmarks about how safe they are (newhope, sidh). The problem is: We really only trust crypto algos if they have been tested and researched over a long time, but lots of these things are pretty new.
> That's called post-quantum cryptography, not quantum cryptography.
As I understand it, "quantum safe" and "post-quantum" describe the same thing.
I never used the term 'quantum cryptography'
Really its not that much different than how things work now. When we send a message around the world, its going through dozens of computers to get there. And wifi can always be an end point extension.
But: Nondeterministic Turing Machine? What? How can it be nondeterministic, and still be a Turing Machine? Aren't they pretty much deterministic by definition?
What about creating cryptography? Wikipedia has a few interesting applications:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_cryptography
I'm not a cryptographer - are security people excited about building all sorts of weird quantum protocols?
> “Then you let the computer check all possible solutions essentially—or a very large combination of them—and come back with an answer,” he says. In a quantum computer, there’s no mathematician cracking the problem, he says. “The laws of physics crack the problem for you.”
That sounds more like an NTM than a quantum computer. An NTM would turn its owner into a God.
> Superposition is the mind-bending observation that a particle can be in two states at the same time. Bring out your ruler to get a measurement, however, and the particle will collapse into one state or the other. And you won’t know which until you try, except in terms of probabilities.
It's not probabilities because people think of those as real numbers. The coefficients are complex numbers. There's a probability monad, for example, but no quantum monad:
http://twistedoakstudios.com/blog/Post5485_what-isnt-a-monad
The article sort of mentions it later on when they quote Scott Aaronson, but I suspect the author didn't understand and mentally reverted back to a probability model.