UltimateUnknown on 25 June 2012
| Dodece said: I have serious reservations in regards to practical applications. In principle it sounds great, but in practice the system will probably never be robust enough to function in a real world setting. Sure you may have some computers using it that are well shielded, and able to be super cooled for maximum efficiency, but those wouldn't be in the hand of private citizens. Far more likely that they would be used for scientific research, and by governments as servers, but you probably wouldn't be using them in your home at least directly. The reality is scientists in this field aren't interested in making a better computer for us as consumers. They want to create a tool that they can use to solve their most difficult problems. That is why the approaches they are using are so impractical. Seriously who is going to want to keep anything super cooled in their house. Not only would it cost the average person a fortune to power, but it is also ridiculously dangerous. |
Well to be honest most of the latest and greatest technologies are built by scientists to meet their research requirements as you mentioned. But many of these technologies end up transitioning over to the casual user at some point. I mean who would have thought that mobile phones would ever be equipped with GPS 20 years ago? One of my maths professors who works at CERN tells us how the worldwide web was pretty much invented there to share large amounts of data between scientists, and look where that is.
So I would never put quantum computing beyond us, although it may take a 100 years to get there.
