Understanding the Limits of Quantum Computers | Berkeley

Submitted by the Event Organizer

Quantum computers are proposed devices that would exploit quantum mechanics to solve certain specific problems dramatically faster than we know how to solve them with today’s computers. In the popular press, quantum computers are often presented not just as an exciting frontier of science and technology (which they are), but as magic devices that would work by simply trying every possible solution in parallel. However, research over the past 25 years has revealed that the truth is much more subtle and problem-dependent: for some types of problems, quantum computers would offer only modest speedups or no speedups at all. These limitations are entirely separate from the practical difficulties of building quantum computers (such as “decoherence”) and apply even to the fully error-corrected quantum computers we hope will be built in the future.

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