Gurkenglas comments on Yet more "stupid" questions - Less Wrong
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How does muscle effort convert into force/Joules applied? What are the specs of muscles? An example of "specs" would be:
I am wondering because I was trying to optimize things like my morning bike ride across the park, questions like whether I should try to maximize my speed for the times when I'm going uphill, so gravity doesn't pull me backward for so long; or whether it is an inefficient move to walk instead of standing on the escalator because it could have carried me up instead, leaving more energy for the minutes of afterward walking.
Yes, yes, wasted thinking time, but my mind keeps wandering there on my way to places and its frustrating not knowing the math behind it.
Similarly: What are a qubit's specs? I would like to be able to think about what class of problem would be trivial with a quantum computer.
Then what you should be asking is "which problems are in BQP?" (if you just want a summary of the high level capabilities that have been proved so far), or "how do quantum circuits work?" (if you want to know what role individual qubits play). I don't think there's any meaningful answer to "a qubit's specs" short of a tutorial in the aforementioned topics. Here is one such tutorial I recommend.