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What Makes Quantum Computing So Hard to Explain?

  • Article
  • Jun 8, 2021
  • #Quantumcomputing
Scott Aaronson
@ScottAaronson
(Author)
www.quantamagazine.org
Read on www.quantamagazine.org
1 Recommender
1 Mention
Quantum computers, you might have heard, are magical uber-machines that will soon cure cancer and global warming by trying all possible answers in different parallel universes. For... Show More

Quantum computers, you might have heard, are magical uber-machines that will soon cure cancer and global warming by trying all possible answers in different parallel universes. For 15 years, on my blog and elsewhere, I’ve railed against this cartoonish vision, trying to explain what I see as the subtler but ironically even more fascinating truth. I approach this as a public service and almost my moral duty as a quantum computing researcher. Alas, the work feels Sisyphean: The cringeworthy hype about quantum computers has only increased over the years, as corporations and governments have invested billions, and as the technology has progressed to programmable 50-qubit devices that (on certain contrived benchmarks) really can give the world’s biggest supercomputers a run for their money. And just as in cryptocurrency, machine learning, and other trendy fields, with money have come hucksters.

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Philip Ball @philipcball · Apr 19, 2023
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Realising that we typically give a misleadingly confident (& wrong) "this is how it happens" about not only quantum speed-up but quantum computing generally was one of my motivations for writing Beyond Weird. Scott's article here from 2021 is one of the best explanations of why.
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