Re: Folding at home and quantum computing
2020/01/31 13:59:13
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As far as I know, quantum computing would go hand in hand with regular computing.
I believe that the current generation has a regular computer to run the regular desktop GUI, with a quantum computer running a quantum software module. Eg: calculate wind direction, virus development, or Google maps live car and traffic feed (or something).
They mentioned that software for quantum computing is extremely hard to create (including like you say, operating systems), and most likely can't be reliably created, or works very buggy.
Quantum computing can be seen as a coprocessor that does a very specific type of computing, but can't be used to do regular day to day jobs.
It took us 30 years to generate GUI operating systems we have today, and quantum computing is a level up in terms of complexity.
However, as we get smarter over time, I do believe that quantum software models can be generated by computers,
Much like folding today, it takes time and energy to create WUs, that then can be processed by a cpu, and fed into a GPU,
I believe scientists will find a sort of 'programming language' some day, that will convert x86 programs into a quantum computer language, and have regular PCs assemble the program, before it gets crunched by the quantum computer.
The difference here, is that quantum computing behaves much like real life, rather than regular computing we do now.
With our current technology, the outcome of a WU will always be the same, no matter on what PC it's ran (provided the Wu ran without errors).
In quantum computing, a WU can be processed multiple times, and each time display a different result; which is much more in line with how this all works in real life.
A WU van be ran several times on one quantum computer in the same time a Wu is ran on our current hardware (at estimated 100x the speed of our current hardware), and would produce a string of results that are very similar, but yet slightly different each time.
This also does away with redundant processing we currently do (to have a WU be verified by other users).
The bad thing is that it'll be very hard to find a mechanism that can verify if a quantum computer is working the way it should, and doesn't act like a random number generator. For a Wu to be accepted there'll probably have to be a certain percentage ratio for a Wu result to be valid.
And for folding, it really depends on how much money companies and scientists are willing to pour into this field.
A quantum computer is an order of magnitude cheaper to run than even a GPU supercomputer, but the science behind reliable software for this application may very well cost so much to generate, it may indeed be unfeasible to see such thing in our lifetime.
But I'm sure that companies are focusing on where the need is greatest. Once the hardware is there, probably Google, IBM, and a few other major companies will pioneer the field in generating software for the most demanded needs (govt data crunching, advertisements, maps, weather prediction, IRS..., Banking institutions and encryptions,...), And at some point folding will be in there as well.