Comic Discussion > QUESTIONABLE CONTENT
Holy Real Life AnthroPC, Batman!
Mr_Rose:
--- Quote from: cesium133 on 27 Nov 2013, 06:44 ---As someone who works with some of the atomic systems that are suggested as possible bases for quantum computing, I'm pretty sure quantum computing, if it ends up working at all, will not be all it's cracked up to be.
--- End quote ---
Oh, no, it will definitely speed up calculation rates and searches by many orders of magnitude, as well as making essentially unbreakable encryption possible.
AI has nothing to do with any of that though.
The problem has never been speed of execution; rather it is determining exactly what to execute. You simply can't write linear code and expect a sapient AI to wake up and the output of nonlinear code is, by its nature, not possible to reliably predict.
KOK:
Isn't it the other way around? Quantum computing will make it possible to break essentially unbreakable encryption.
cesium133:
Both. Most currently-existing encryption algorithms rely on the inability of current computers to factor large numbers. If you had a sufficiently large and powerful quantum computer, you could easily implement Shor's Algorithm, which allows quantum computers to factor numbers far more efficiently than electronic computers. The problem is getting a quantum computer capable of factoring numbers that large. The current record so far is something along the lines of solving 15=5*3 with 90% confidence in a few days. Until quantum computers can get a lot better than that, forget about them factoring an encryption key.
The other side of it is that you could in theory use a quantum computer to set up unbreakable encryption by using entanglement. The challenge, though, is getting the entanglement to work over long enough distances that you could actually transmit the key from the sender to the receiver, and that's not particularly close to happening, either.
edit -- reading a bit more about it now, and they've since advanced the state of the art by factoring 21.
Is it cold in here?:
I think you mean most public-key algorithms.
cesium133:
Yeah, I was referring to public-key algorithms there.
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