Re: How fast will a quantum computer be?

Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
24 Sep 1998 19:02:58 +0200

Hal Finney <hal@rain.org> writes:

> A problem like you are describing can be thought of as a search problem.
> You want to search through a list of candidate values for one which
> satisfies a certain criterion (in this case, being a CAD specification
> of a spaceship, etc.).
...
> In your case, if your classical computer would take 2 to the power of
> 1 billion possibilities to calculate, the quantum computer would
> take the square root of that, which means halving the exponent. This
> is 2 to the power of 500 million possibilities.

Of course, now we are talking about a brute force quantum search. What would be interesting to think of is quantum genetic algorithms or other methods that make use of the redundancies in the problem. 

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Anders Sandberg                                      Towards Ascension!
asa@nada.kth.se                            http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/
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