marc comments on Bloggingheads: Yudkowsky and Aaronson talk about AI and Many-worlds - Less Wrong

18 Post author: Vladimir_Nesov 16 August 2009 04:06PM

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Comment author: marc 17 August 2009 11:23:56PM 2 points [-]

I guess that quantum computers halve the doubling time, as compared to a classical computer, because every extra qubit squares the available state space. This could give the factor two in the exponential of Moore's law.

Quantum computing performance currently isn't doubling but it isn't jammed either. Decoherence is no longer considered to be a fundamental limit, it's more a practical inconvenience. The change that brought this about was the invention of quantum error correcting codes.

However experimental physicists are still searching for the ideal practical implementation. You might compare the situation to that of the pre-silicon days of classical computing. Until this gets sorted I doubt there will be any Moore's law type growth.

Comment author: timtyler 18 August 2009 07:55:27AM 0 points [-]

I looked at:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_error_correction

The bit about the threshold theorem looks interesting.

However, I would be more impressed by a working implementation ;-)