In reply to wintertree:
> Perhaps I am being very blinkered but it’s not clear to me that QC is so transformative.
I'm no expert on quantum computing and I'm less confident it will be workable than the other technologies.
However, if we figure out how to make practical, relatively large quantum computers it is literally paradigm shifting. At the moment if you have an n-step problem you can do it in one time period with n sets of hardware, n time periods with one set of hardware with a quantum computer can do all n-steps simultaneously with one set of hardware.
Where you have a search problem where the number of compute steps needed to check every outcome scales exponentially with the problem size you very quickly can't just brute-force it on conventional hardware but a quantum computer doesn't care.
> Beyond that, QC transforms some very specific problems that are rarely the limiting factor of how useful a computer is.
I'm not sure, I think there's a distinction between what problems algorithms are already being developed for and which may be within the reach of quantum computers early on and how far quantum computers could go if the hardware became more practical.
Post edited at 21:31