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this post was submitted on 06 Feb 2026
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Depends what you're ascribing to it.
Will it break encryption? Yes. That's been well understood since the 90's.
Will it help solve certain specific physics problems, including practical ones? Also yes.
Will it do literally anything else? Maybe, maybe not. Honestly, even calling it a "computer" is misleading unless you're an expert. For layman purposes it's more like an electron microscope or ultracentrifuge. Very useful for a very narrow set of tasks.
I know about Shor and Grover algorithms and database search. My doubts are about the availability of scalable implementations of Quantum compunting.
Ah. Yeah, that's not a sure thing, but progress has been very, very encouraging lately, and there's no obvious fundamental limit, either. Advancement in the error correcting codes has even happened, which was unexpected when the big push to build a QC began.
(FWIW, Grover's search algorithm is more of a toy than anything. You're getting a quadratic speedup on exponentially hard problems, which leaves them still exponentially hard)