This is a <i>great</i> talk. Like, I am going to be linking people to this for years. It mentions the basics, goes over an example use, and just generally has the perfect amount of "this could be cool".<p>The one thing that bothered me, in the whole talk, is when he said that a 10-qubit circuit was beyond anything we could run right now. Simulators like Liquid [1] or even my browser-drag-and-drop toy Quirk [2] would easily run that circuit. In hindsight it's obvious that he meant <i>on an actual quantum computer</i>.<p>1: <a href="http://stationq.github.io/Liquid/" rel="nofollow">http://stationq.github.io/Liquid/</a><p>2: <a href="http://algorithmicassertions.com/quirk" rel="nofollow">http://algorithmicassertions.com/quirk</a>
This is very interesting, but I don't understand many things he said.<p>is there a good introductory material for writing code for quantum computers and how quantum computers work?<p>also is there a way to evaluate the performance boost with the simulator?
18:17 is when it gets really good<p>i think referring to it as a lookup table is self confounding<p>the whole thing still regretfully relies on the random<p>periodicity is the way to go but periodicity in place of the look up table<p>i was stunned to see the graph at 19:53<p>to come by that graph through such a probabilistic method is validating<p>those etched silicon photonic quantum gates shown following 23:14 are awesome<p>the variable temperature controlled index of refraction phase operation reminded me of a previous link using optics to solve np-complete problems(o) and someone compared it to a sleep sort<p>when he put up the results at 22:14 comparing with monte carlo i wondered what the time difference was for each calculated result<p>i understand that energy requirements for the kind of state control necessary, like the low temperatures, the 2 degree kelvin quoted at 26:53, for single infared photon detection, make these physical quantum computers impractical when compared to classical computations like the monte carlo example.. he also talks a bit about decoherence issues as an unfortunate race saying 'so long to finish the program' how long is so long?<p>though the clear consistency between the classical and physical quantum computer results is definitely more than 'almost interesting' i do wonder about what time was spent to get each result.. the goal is to optimise for speed, right?<p>the simulator(i) is really cool<p>(o) <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12362044" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12362044</a><p>(i) <a href="http://qcengine.com/" rel="nofollow">http://qcengine.com/</a>
This is awesome, I think I learned more about how QC works in this one talk than in everything I've seen and read up till now. What the gates actually are, what they do, and their relation to real bits and qbits