This is great! I think quantum computers are inevitable at some point as soon as we figure out how to effectively isolate them from their environment (to prevent decoherence).
In this case, the theory is way ahead of the practice, and it would seem wise to go ahead and begin offering CS courses now in quantum programming and quantum algorithms so by the time these computers are built, we're all ready to hit the ground running. Websites like this one Google has made are a good start.
Quantum computing will revolution a lot of fields. In my field (molecular dynamics and quantum chemistry), there's an issue known as the fermion sign problem, which essentially puts a hard limit on what we can accomplish through classical simulation. It basically says that the most accurate methods of performing quantum simulation scale with 2^(3N) number of particles. There is no classical computer that can handle this for any molecular system of interest, and there will never be one either. However, a quantum computer can solve this problem in non-exponential time (can't remember the exact complexity off-hand). What does this mean? Quantum simulation will lead to huge advances in materials science. Maybe we could even find a room-temperature superconductor with this kind of approach.
In this case, the theory is way ahead of the practice, and it would seem wise to go ahead and begin offering CS courses now in quantum programming and quantum algorithms so by the time these computers are built, we're all ready to hit the ground running. Websites like this one Google has made are a good start.
Quantum computing will revolution a lot of fields. In my field (molecular dynamics and quantum chemistry), there's an issue known as the fermion sign problem, which essentially puts a hard limit on what we can accomplish through classical simulation. It basically says that the most accurate methods of performing quantum simulation scale with 2^(3N) number of particles. There is no classical computer that can handle this for any molecular system of interest, and there will never be one either. However, a quantum computer can solve this problem in non-exponential time (can't remember the exact complexity off-hand). What does this mean? Quantum simulation will lead to huge advances in materials science. Maybe we could even find a room-temperature superconductor with this kind of approach.