Researchers Created 'Quantum Artificial Life' For the First Time (vice.com)

From a report: For the first time, an international team of researchers has used a quantum computer to create artificial life -- a simulation of living organisms that scientists can use to understand life at the level of whole populations all the way down to cellular interactions. With the quantum computer, individual living organisms represented at a microscopic level with superconducting qubits were made to "mate," interact with their environment, and "die" to model some of the major factors that influence evolution. The new research, published in Scientific Reports on Thursday, is a breakthrough that may eventually help answer the question of whether the origin of life can be explained by quantum mechanics, a theory of physics that describes the universe in terms of the interactions between subatomic particles. Modeling quantum artificial life is a new approach to one of the most vexing questions in science: How does life emerge from inert matter, such as the "primordial soup" of organic molecules that once existed on Earth?

Comments

Great, more Quantum Bullshit!

[gweihir]

Seriously, this is getting utterly ridiculous and not in any funny sense. That whole "quantum computing" thing is nonsense, get over it. And stop to find "new" applications that nobody needs and that work better on a classical computer anyways.

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[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

This...is technobabble.

Insofar as life started by bootstrapping from inanimate complex molecules, it isn't a difficult concept, and requires discrete units of atoms and molecules with real properties.

There's nothing directly quantum required as life is all about chemistry at a very gross scale above the quantum.