Actual Uses for Near-Term Quantum Computers

Re:Actual Uses for Near-Term Quantum Computers by rbanffy on Thursday March 21, 2024 @05:56PM (#39784885)

I think of them now as special-purpose accelerators, or, perhaps better, analog computers for simulating quantum phenomena.

But that's because of their current limitations - they still need a classical computer to set them up, the same way analog computers were configured to perform a specific job with wires, amplifiers, and function generators (because we didn't have digital computers that could do that for us). What would a function itself represented as a network of qubits to be applied on data qubits even look like?

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Re:Actual Uses for Near-Term Quantum Computers by sudosysgen on Thursday March 21, 2024 @06:18PM (#39785111)

There is such a thing as a quantum Turing machine. A classical computer isn't needed in theory so long as you can make a quantum register, it's just way better to set it up with a classical computer instead of a temperamental and expensive quantum one.

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Re:Actual Uses for Near-Term Quantum Computers by rbanffy on Friday March 22, 2024 @07:58AM (#39789774)

> it's just way better to set it up with a classical computer instead of a temperamental and expensive quantum one.

That's an engineering problem ;-)

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