Quote from: mwizard on January 08, 2015, 10:31:48 PM

Quote from: Jcar797 on January 08, 2015, 03:50:57 AM

A little random, but Im supprised that everyone seems so sarcastic about quantum computing: certain labs have been able to send data using quantum computing and were even able to run the most basic algorithm that would be predicted to work. It may not sound like much, but quantum computing will be something will have access to relatively soon.

Quantum computing has a few issues.

1) We are a very very long way from making a working quantum computer. All that we can do at the moment is create a quantum bit (qbit) and manipulate it in simple ways.

2) Quantum computing is not deterministic with exact answers as in traditional computing. Instead a quantum computer would give results with a probability of being correct. A program run on a quantum computer may give a slightly different result each time it is run.

Quantum computing has some similarities to analog computing.

3) Quantum computers cannot solve anything beyond that possible with traditional computers. They are just theoretically faster for specific problems.

In more detail a qbit is the quantum equivalence of the traditional computing 0 and 1 except it has a probability of being any value between 0 and 1. For example a qbit could be loaded with a 25% probability of being 1, thus an 75% probability of being a 0. Various operations are then available to manipulate and combine qbit probabilities. It is only when the final result is read out that everything reverts to the traditional 0 and 1 world based on the final probabilities.

See for example http://gizmodo.com/whats-wrong-with-quantum-computing-1444793497
and
http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/The_Limits_of_Quantum_Computers.pdf

Yes but understand this: If quantum mining is 10000000000000x better than asic, then the financial incentive to discover it first is, well, very, very, very large. at first of course. good for developement