That [locking 30 NSA Ph.D.s in a secret room] is not likely to work. Progress on this type of computing is likely to take a lot of new ideas and development to actually reduce to practice. It will take a lot of people, working in parallel on different techniques to see if/how this can be made to work.
There are a lot more than 30 Ph.D.-level people working on this problem around the world, most of whom are probably talking to each other in conferences every year, and their progress is relatively slow.
Sure, once a technology is mature (i.e., you actually know it works and how it is done) NSA could put a lab in their basement full of quantum computers. But those 30 hypothetical NSA guys are probably NOT going to get a practical quantum computer working any sooner than the community at large. Furthermore, 30 Ph.D.'s can probably advance NSA's agenda much more efficiently by working on something much more practical.
Since this is/., I'll simply say "think of the scientific process as open-source. Your idea is closed-source."
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That [locking 30 NSA Ph.D.s in a secret room] is not likely to work. Progress on this type of computing is likely to take a lot of new ideas and development to actually reduce to practice. It will take a lot of people, working in parallel on different techniques to see if/how this can be made to work.
/., I'll simply say "think of the scientific process as open-source. Your idea is closed-source."
There are a lot more than 30 Ph.D.-level people working on this problem around the world, most of whom are probably talking to each other in conferences every year, and their progress is relatively slow.
Sure, once a technology is mature (i.e., you actually know it works and how it is done) NSA could put a lab in their basement full of quantum computers. But those 30 hypothetical NSA guys are probably NOT going to get a practical quantum computer working any sooner than the community at large. Furthermore, 30 Ph.D.'s can probably advance NSA's agenda much more efficiently by working on something much more practical.
Since this is