Yup. Agreed. However, anything like that is not even in the lab yet. There are still a few steps to take between current state and that state.
//There are still a few steps to take between current state and that state.
Well, done. I think there are at least 3 puns in that one sentence, given the subject.
Something I’ve noticed in my computers is that we’re not getting the huge improvements in speed any more. I think the silicon generally has the power, but software hasn’t really caught up. My current desktop is an I-9 with 16 cores and 32GB of memory. I really don’t see it as being significantly more powerful, except in some very specific use cases, than the 8-core I7 I had 12 years ago.
OTOH, I can crank up 6 to 8 VMs and not notice significant lag from a CPU perspective with any of them. Granted, if one of them is doing significant disk work, it’s gonna slow down disk access to the others.
Agree that perfected quantum computers are a decade away or more. Disagree that less than perfect versions of quantum computers will not be able to do useful and important work in the interem.
See the quotes from articles in the last year below to get a feel for the state of the play.
How long until that future arrives? Most current quantum computers have around a hundred qubits at most. That might increase to a thousand or so over the next few years, but quantum computers that are actually useful are probably at least a decade away. For now our classical world is safe.
https://medium.com/one-pale-blue-dot/how-close-are-we-to-a-quantum-future-6abb38f551f7
For 20 years scientists and engineers have been saying that “someday” they’ll build a full-fledged quantum computer able to perform useful calculations that would overwhelm any conventional supercomputer. But current machines contain just a few dozen quantum bits, or qubits, too few to do anything dazzling. Today, IBM made its aspirations more concrete by publicly announcing a “road map” for the development of its quantum computers, including the ambitious goal of building one containing 1000 qubits by 2023. IBM’s current largest quantum computer, revealed this month, contains 65 qubits.
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/09/ibm-promises-1000-qubit-quantum-computer-milestone-2023
Can less than perfect quantum computer do work on improvements made in the next five years?
Yes.
For most scientists, a quantum computer that can solve large-scale business problems is still a prospect that belongs to the distant future, and one that won’t be realized for at least another decade.
But now researchers from US banking giant Goldman Sachs and quantum computing company QC Ware have designed new quantum algorithms that they say could significantly boost the efficiency of some critical financial operations – on hardware that might be available in only five years’ time.
Rather than waiting for a fully-fledged quantum computer, bankers could start running the new algorithms on near-term quantum hardware and reap the benefits of the technology even while quantum devices remain immature.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/quantum-computers-could-be-doing-useful-work-more-quickly-than-everyone-thought/
The US National Institute of Standards and Technology has already said that quantum computers will be able to crack the existing public-key infrastructure like 128-bit AES encryption by 2029. https://physicsworld.com/a/quantum-technology-why-the-future-is-already-on-its-way/