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Ther are plenty of well documented uses for quantum computers, the hardware is just too nascent to fully accommodate them. The most powerful quantum computers today still only have just over 1,000 qbits.



I don't think this is totally accurate.

If you have significantly better quantum computers, you can solve realistic problems, yes.

But what's not being spelled out here is that as far as we know classical computers will still totally smoke them unless you allow a large probability of inaccurate results.

And if you are fine with inaccurate results, classical randomized algorithms make it a much more difficult deadline to beat.


What is the benchmark to have something useful for real-world use in number of qbits?


20 million physical qubits to break RSA 2048: https://quantum-journal.org/papers/q-2021-04-15-433/.


Physicist here. It highly depends on a bunch of factors (the type of qubits, the error correcting code, the error rate, the algorithm…), but a ballpark number for practical usefulness is 1 million physical qubits.

Keep in mind that qubit requirements keep tumbling down as people work hard to squeeze out as much as possible from a limited number of qubits.


Assuming what the public knows about is the state of the art, of course, which I doubt is a good assumption to make. I'm sure major governments have been funneling billions for years into secret projects to be the first to be able to break the (non-post-quantum) communications of everyone else.




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