Scott Aaronson: Quantum Computing, Capabilities and Limit...

Scott Aaronson: Quantum Computing, Capabilities and Limits: An Interview with Scott Aaronson: "1,000 qubits... an amplitude... [for] every possible setting of all 1,000 bits.... Quantum mechanics has been telling us since the 1920s... to keep track of the state... nature is somehow keeping track of this list of 2 to the 1000 power complex numbers, which is more numbers than can be written in the entire observable universe. But... when you make a measurement you don���t actually see these numbers, you just see a single probabilistic outcome... a random answer. If you just wanted a random answer, well you could have picked one yourself with a lot less trouble? So the entire hope for getting a speed advantage from a quantum computer is to exploit the way that these amplitudes work differently than probabilities. The main thing that amplitudes can do, that probabilities don���t do is that they can interfere with each other...

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