So now the only thing stopping me from programming a quantum computer is thinking of any damned thing to do with it. Innovative new ways to feel ineffectual!
I think there's a lot of interesting optimization problems that this could lend weight to. There's a lot of small-ish manufacturers out there pushing the limits of materials science, where being able to leverage quantum computing could be a real advantage.
That said, I'm also curious what this means for attacks against cryptosystems -- something tells me that anything that wasn't secure against various quantum attacks either is, or will shortly be, blown wide open.
Quantum computers do not currently solve any problems of the size or accuracy of interest to any commercial industry that classical computers don’t solve better and faster.
We are years away from any of that. This is a simulator first and foremost, with some basic option to run it on a primitive quantum computer for real. In any case, there are still massive practical hurdles that need to be overcome to make quantum computing useful for any real world scenario. Breaking cryptography will require up to tens of thousands of QBits.
It's fascinating how we've come full circle in computing and we're back to booking compute time and putting jobs in a queue to run on a big shared machine again. My Dad used to tell me about how he'd have to wait to run things on the DEC machines where he worked in '70s, wait for the output to print out, and debug his code by hand before he could run it again. No doubt writing software to run on Amazon Braket would be a pretty similar process if it weren't for the simulators.
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[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 46.2 ms ] thread[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21684668
[2]: https://venturebeat.com/2020/08/13/amazon-launches-braket-qu...
https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2019/12/introduci...
That said, I'm also curious what this means for attacks against cryptosystems -- something tells me that anything that wasn't secure against various quantum attacks either is, or will shortly be, blown wide open.
What would the use case be for material science?
I thought it just mean faster hardware, but they talk about specifically designing quantum algorithms.