
Quantum Algorithm Zoo - cskau
http://math.nist.gov/quantum/zoo/
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cyode
Surprising to me is seeing that some of the papers cited here were published
in the mid-90s. That's 5 or 10 years before when I would've guessed.

Makes me think of Ada Lovelace and how awesome the mind can be when grappling
with the abstract (though I'm sure non-quantum computers were still some help
here to researchers for fiddling with quantum algorithms).

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Beltiras
There are a couple of those that might be relevant to work I am doing. Just
wondering what the horizon should be for someone to dive into QC. The
engineering doesn't seem to be anywhere near where a mid-sized company can buy
or rent access to a reasonably sized machine any time soon (thinking about
timescale next 10 years or so). Super interesting thou.

~~~
marcosdumay
There are no reasonably sized machines.

QC is currently basic research. It's not clear when machines large enough to
be useful will exist, and I don't understand the reasons behind the current
development speed. But keep in mind that we have computers with ~20qubits, and
people have been consistently adding 3 more qubits every 2 years, for a rather
long time.

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Beltiras
Isn't this the same as development of classical computers? We are still in the
phase that classical computer were in in the 20's to 40's. Once you crack the
lid and make something mass-producible, exponential advancement will take over
for as long as physics allows it (which in QC is an extremely deep well).

~~~
marcosdumay
I can't imagine how to trace a parallel. Even before that, classical computers
stayed a very long time "on the lab", and by that time the expansion in
functionality was way more visible than any expansion of size. Only after
people kind of agreed on what a "computer" can do (at the 40's) that we got
any clear size expansion, that was exponential.

As a comparison, we have a very nice idea on the requisites of a quantum
computer. Nobody is exploring this space. Also, we have that very clear linear
growth on their size, while we didn't have even a clear size measure for
classical computers.

It looks like something very different to me. Really, that linear growth is
unsettling in many ways.

