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Re:Trump administration establishes $75M quantum computing c... by dr_dshiv on Wednesday July 22, 2020 @04:01AM (#23914910)
Someone needs to invest in developing improved mental models for quantum computers. Much of the development of classical computing (particular from a user perspective) was driven by metaphors: memory, stacks, pipes, files, folders, etc.

What are useful metaphors in the application or use of quantum computers?

Re:Trump administration establishes $75M quantum computing c... by ahelwer on Wednesday July 22, 2020 @07:20AM (#23915828)
Quantum computers are modeled with extremely basic linear algebra. Quantum states are vectors and gates are matrices which multiply those vectors to get new vectors. How much simpler do you want? You can explain most of it as rotations around the unit circle which we all learn in high school or earlier.

The problem is pop science crap that tries to explain superposition and entanglement with complete word salad instead of "linear combination" and "product vector cannot be factored into tensor product of single-qbit states", respectively.

Anyway it is extremely doubtful that more programmers will need to learn how to program a quantum computer than, say, will need to learn how to program a GPU. They're both useful co-processors for very specific workloads. Programming will remain a fundamentally classical endeavor.

Re:Trump administration establishes $75M quantum computing c... by dr_dshiv on Thursday July 23, 2020 @09:15AM (#23927000)
I'm not necessarily asking for better metaphors of quantum phenomena. But the opportunities or affordances of quantum computers is extremely unclear, even to experts. It's like explaining the physics of a transistor to someone and waiting for them to come up with an app design.

Taking the analogy of a GPU, how would you describe what a quantum coprocessor could do for a specialist (in, say, neuroscience or material science)? What kind of datasets would be appropriate? How should they think about what can be done with quantum processing? That's where I think there is room for metaphor development.

Re:Trump administration establishes $75M quantum computing c... by ahelwer on Saturday July 25, 2020 @09:58AM (#23949203)
The short answer is that all of this info is out there, but it doesn't live in pop science articles.

For materials scientists the value proposition is clear: quantum computers will enable efficient quantum chemistry simulations. Here is an overview paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/1808.10402

Re:Trump administration establishes $75M quantum computing c... by tlackemann on Wednesday July 22, 2020 @01:03PM (#23919082)
This was a great explanation, thanks for the breakdown
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Re:Trump administration establishes $75M quantum computing c... by ahelwer on Wednesday July 22, 2020 @10:20AM (#23917261)
Popular science has been trying to explain quantum mechanics to people for well over half a century now, and it hasn't worked one time. All we got was a bunch of woo like What the Bleep do We Know?! You need math. There's no other way around it. Any understanding of quantum mechanics or computing that is not fundamentally rooted in mathematical reasoning is worse than mush.
Re:Trump administration establishes $75M quantum computing c... by Lambdanaut on Wednesday July 22, 2020 @11:01AM (#23917754)
It was incredibly helpful to me though. Now I feel like maybe I could actually grok quantum computing.
Re:Trump administration establishes $75M quantum computing c... by j-walker on Wednesday July 22, 2020 @02:13PM (#23919899)
Have you seen Dave Jone's video on quantum computing?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nOQhdgY8aBM

Re:Trump administration establishes $75M quantum computing c... by derrick_jensen on Wednesday July 22, 2020 @10:03AM (#23917080)
Most advantages that quantum computing has aren't practical for most people outside "the HN tech bubble". It's meant for specialized types of high throughput computations.