- Is it a hype ?
- Is it vaporware ?
- Will it have applications in 50 years ?
- Is it vaporware ?
- Will it have applications in 50 years ?
Right now, yes. It's the smaller of the two "shiny objects" that all of the computer industry is chasing, mostly uselessly.
Yes, right now it does nothing useful.
At the rate it is going, it will probably have applications in 10 years. Except that I don't like the applications: The few things that quantum seems to be exceedingly good at is: (a) solving combinatorial optimization problem, for which we currently have very good heuristic solutions already, and (b) decrypting things. That latter application is a giant problem. Today, we have quantum-proof encryption methods, but they are still exotic, and few normal people are using them (they are in use in the big cloud computing companies for securing internal data on disk and internal communications). So once quantum computers start working, a lot of encrypted data and communication will become vulnerable to those few organizations that can afford large quantum computers. A lot of amateurs and clueless professionals will continue to think that "just using ssh or pgp" is still good enough, but the agencies will be able to read all their stuff. I hope that amateurs switch to better cryptographic algorithms soon ... and to be honest, I myself haven't done anything about that at home yet.
I hear the one time pad wants to say something to that.
Only the vigor port. And using X11. Try it, it's a hoot.
You just described world superpowers, y'know...
