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warplants t1_istgc1j wrote

Here’s the problem with quantum computing: yes you’re simultaneously evaluating countless potential “possibilities”, but at the end the QC only gives you the answer for one randomly chosen possibility. In that sense it’s far worse than just brute-forcing through every possibility with a classical computer, as at least with the classical computer you know which result corresponds with which possibility.

The sole advantage of the QC is that it can evaluate far more possibilities than can be classically brute-forced. But, again, when it spits out the answer, it erases the work done on all possibilities except the one randomly chosen by your measurement.

This means that at a minimum, you have to run the same problem many times on a QC to get a distribution of possible answers (since each individual answer is basically meaningless). Once you have a distribution, if you’re lucky you might see that certain solutions are more/less common that others, and this in itself may give you some insight to the problem you’re originally trying to solve.

TLDR computing anything with a QC is hugely inefficient compared to classical compute, the only problems you might even consider for a QC are those that simply can’t be classically computed in human timescales.

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