IARPA: Disbelief to Doubt

IARPA: Disbelief To Doubt Podcast
Episode 4: Quantum Leaps
Guest: Dr. Michael DiRosa

Episode 4 Teaser Transcript

Michael DiRosa:
That to do this with a quantum computer would take, about some tens of millions of qubits. And the algorithm itself would take some tens of billions of steps. After that, through this algorithm with a quantum computer, you would arrive at an answer to that problem - that if left to a classical computer would take, round estimate, a quadrillion years to solve. That's a long time! Longer than the age of the universe. There is the allure then for quantum computing to be applied to other problems and to the earliest visionary ideas for using quantum computers and that was for: simulating physical systems, for simulating physics and related problems in chemistry, biology, medicine.
How could we arrive at superconductivity at room temperature? How could we discover drugs and cures faster than we do now? So, there's this sense that quantum computing is not superior in every regard to classical computing, but there are some classes of problems that gives it impetus to discover what this frontier of computing might be like.