My primary professional interest is AI and quantum computing to pushing the field forward seems almost inevitable.
https://home.cern/sites/home.web.cern.ch/files/image/update-...
That doesn't happen that often and it's one of the most exciting things to be about being in the field. If that interest you, then you might want to come work at Rigetti Computing: "The Tiny Startup Racing Google to Build a Quantum Computing Chip" https://www.technologyreview.com/s/600711/the-tiny-startup-r... We're hiring.
I think they could be on to something with their approaches, both physical and theoretical. I could definitely see a QPU in a few years serving a role in Google Cloud for specific computations. But I don't think that the groups are currently getting the headcount and engineering power that they need, I think the worst bottleneck I saw on the theoretical side was a lack of fulltime engineers to test and implement the researcher's awesome ideas. I'm hoping that gets more attention and resources, because I think Google might actually be sitting on another goldmine here.
Caveats: it is possible there exists a superior classical algorithm that can solve the problem efficiently enough, and that we just haven't found it yet. It is also still within the realm of possibility that there exists an algorithm that can simulate any quantum computer with only polynomial slowdown, which would show quantum computers are not drastically faster for any problem.
[1] https://www.quora.com/How-much-did-Google-pay-for-the-quantu...
Yet beside bluffs and prototypes that require superconductor with very cold -230° C to do little, none of them resurfaced later.
Quantum Computers can be exiting and devastating. What happens if the first company/state keeps it a trade secrete and uses Quantum Computers without telling the rest of the world? (what if...) With Quantum Computers all the "secure digital stuff" of today can be broken, say good bye to your cloud online security. A good/bad actor can read everything. We should think about how to mitigate this issue, isn't it?
For a very select set of problems (factoring and discrete log), quantum computers are exponentially faster than classical computers. For a few (including np-complete problems), they are quadratically faster. For everything else, they're no faster. (When I say "faster", I really mean the runtime of the best known quantum algorithms is better.)
For the forseeable future, quantum computers will be much smaller than classical computers -- the article is about Google building a 49 bit QC and how that would be a breakthrough. So for the forseeable future, they'll be separate components, used for special cases.
A generalized quantum computer able to run standard computing algorithms is very far in the future and so much basic research in computing science has to happen before it can be talked about meaningfully.
That's quite an uninformed comment. Anybody thinking this can start at Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_computing#Timeline
That list has completely functional computers with up to 4 qbits with results to show.
(The noise rates will still be relatively high, and they might not be able to measure [and reinitialize] qubits at intermediate steps, feeding results back adaptively. Practically, that would limit using fault tolerance.)
I work in quantum computing and it's the book I always recommend.
http://twistedoakstudios.com/blog/Post2644_grovers-quantum-s...
