The Unvarnished Truth About What Quantum Computing Really Is

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Supposedly, quantum computers can do things that classical computers can’t.

As if it weren’t enough to claim Quantum computing could solve problems that are essentially unsolvable by today’s supercomputers, it is said that quantum computing will allow us to solve problems that are intractable to any supercomputer we could ever build.

In 2019, Google was the first to claim a quantum advantage. Their Sycamore quantum computer solved a task a classical computer couldn’t. A couple of years later, in 2021, a Chinese team reported that its quantum computer, Zuchongzhi, had solved a problem in an hour that had taken eight years on a classical supercomputer.

But the problems that Sycamore and Zuchongzhi solved were deliberately designed to demonstrate the superiority of quantum computing. However, these problems are of no practical interest.

We’re still waiting for someone to demonstrate that a quantum computer can solve a relevant problem faster than a classical computer.

Unfortunately, It’s not like you’re just going to throw something at a quantum computer, and it’s going to work. Quantum computing is a radically different approach to processing information. First, we must encode the problem we want to solve into qubits. Second, we must craft an algorithm that takes…