Re: Computability in principle

From: Anton van Straaten (anton_at_appsolutions.com)
Date: 11/06/03 

Date: Thu, 06 Nov 2003 01:52:25 GMT

Aaron Denney wrote:
> On 2003-11-05, Anton van Straaten <anton@appsolutions.com> wrote:
> > Markus Mottl wrote:
> >> In comp.lang.functional Erann Gat <gat@jpl.nasa.gov> wrote:
> >> > It is not yet clear whether quantum computation can really be made to
> >> > work. It may be that the practical difficulty of keeping N qbits
> > mutually
> >> > entangled grows exponentially with N, in which case the same argument
> > may
> >> > well apply.
> >>
> >> Indeed, I also fear that your argument might turn out to be true in
> >> practice. But well, as long as there is no evidence against
large-scale
> >> quantum computers, I'll retain some healthy optimism :-)
> >
> > My suspicion is that quantum computers will indeed turn out to be
> > miraculous, with one minor drawback: when they produce a correct answer,
it
> > will not necessarily appear in the same universe in which the question
was
> > asked...
>
> Thinking of quantum computers as "harnessing the powers of multiple
> universes" is not a fruitful way to think of their speed-ups over
> classical computers.

I see that on some level, you understood my point.

Anton