Disclaimer: I am not and expert and not even an amateur in the area, just an interested layperson. Also, consider reading everything Scott Aaronson writes on his blog about this topic.
Basically, there are several known tasks on which quantum computers perform better than classical computers, such as simulations of quantum systems (like that quantum chemistry you mention), quantum-certified randomness, some types of authentication, encryption and secure transmission, factoring, database search and a few others. They are no better than classical computers at general NP-complete tasks.
So, odds are that there will be “quantum modules” incorporated into the usual classical computers (and by classical computers I mean the successors of what we now think of as smartphones, e.g. iPhone 30q or qPixel 2040 or Galaxy Q50). The user-visible effects might be something like a “quantum-secure padlock” in your browser. On the server side there might be something like quantum search modules used by the likes of Amazon, Google and Oracle.
I’d also bet that there will be at least one or two unexpected applications of QC discovered in the next couple of decades, judging by the progress in the field, but it’s hard to guess whether they will have any revolutionary impact, rather than an incremental change in a specific area.
The database search thing is, according to my understanding, widely misinterpreted. As Wikipedia says:
Although the purpose of Grover’s algorithm is usually described as “searching a database”, it may be more accurate to describe it as “inverting a function”. In fact since the oracle for an unstructured database requires at least linear complexity, the algorithm cannot be used for actual databases.
To actually build Quantum Postgres, you need something that can store an enormous number of qubits, like a hard drive.
Yeah, no quantum postgres (or, pardon the namespace collision, no quantum Oracle), but maybe some unstructured tree search. Which could also be useful for game AIs, incidentally, since quadratic speedup can make a lot of difference there. But yeah, this depends on having fault-tolerant QC with many thousands or maybe hundreds of thousands qubits.
Disclaimer: I am not and expert and not even an amateur in the area, just an interested layperson. Also, consider reading everything Scott Aaronson writes on his blog about this topic.
Basically, there are several known tasks on which quantum computers perform better than classical computers, such as simulations of quantum systems (like that quantum chemistry you mention), quantum-certified randomness, some types of authentication, encryption and secure transmission, factoring, database search and a few others. They are no better than classical computers at general NP-complete tasks.
So, odds are that there will be “quantum modules” incorporated into the usual classical computers (and by classical computers I mean the successors of what we now think of as smartphones, e.g. iPhone 30q or qPixel 2040 or Galaxy Q50). The user-visible effects might be something like a “quantum-secure padlock” in your browser. On the server side there might be something like quantum search modules used by the likes of Amazon, Google and Oracle.
I’d also bet that there will be at least one or two unexpected applications of QC discovered in the next couple of decades, judging by the progress in the field, but it’s hard to guess whether they will have any revolutionary impact, rather than an incremental change in a specific area.
The database search thing is, according to my understanding, widely misinterpreted. As Wikipedia says:
To actually build Quantum Postgres, you need something that can store an enormous number of qubits, like a hard drive.
Yeah, no quantum postgres (or, pardon the namespace collision, no quantum Oracle), but maybe some unstructured tree search. Which could also be useful for game AIs, incidentally, since quadratic speedup can make a lot of difference there. But yeah, this depends on having fault-tolerant QC with many thousands or maybe hundreds of thousands qubits.