Quantum Computing Explained! (Well, Sorta)

An anonymous reader writes "Valiant effort to 'explain' quantum computing over on silicon.com — covering the difference between classical computers and quantum machines."

Comments

One minor mistake

[vlm]

One more thing, there is a minority of scientists who believe that building a quantum computer will turn out to be out-and-out impossible.

However, if those scientists are right, the implication of not being able to build such a machine is that quantum mechanics itself, as a description of nature, is wrong. Either way, the stakes could not be higher.

One possible failure mode is the theoretical power required could exceed the light fluxs of the visible universe, that would be a bummer. Maybe in true supercomputer style, a formerly computational problem is merely converted into an I/O problem, the interface to the classical world might be too slow/imprecise/analog/noisy/random to pull useful results out of it. Nothing wrong with quantum theory at all, just not possible to interface usefully with the greater classical world.

Or the more practical engineering/accounting failure mode where it would simply be cheaper / faster / more efficient to use mass produced classical processor, possibly for any problem.