On 15 December 2013 16:25, Steven D'Aprano <st...@pearwood.info> wrote: > On Sun, Dec 15, 2013 at 03:40:38PM +0000, Mark Lawrence wrote: >> On 15/12/2013 04:55, William Ray Wing wrote: > >> >Well, as it turns out, there actually *IS* a commercially available >> >quantum computer on the market today. >> >> Are you saying that it can't do list comprehensions, recursive functions >> and floating point arithmetic correctly? > > Neither William nor the article say anything about D-Wave's quantum > computer being unable to do list comprehensions, recursive functions or > floating point arithmentic correctly. > > I'm not an expert on quantum computing, but the impression that I get is > that trying to use a quantum computer for calculating fundamentally > classical operations like floating point, or serial calculations like > list comprehensions, would be rather like somebody being shown a > "horseless carriage" early in the 20th century and asking "So, how do I > get it to trot?" The point of an automobile is to get from A to B, not > to duplicate the motion of a horse, and likewise the point of a quantum > computer is to solve problems, not to duplicate the exact same > algorithms that you would use on classical computers. > > But I could be wrong.
You're not wrong. I'm not an expert on Quantum computing either (I almost applied for a PhD in it but changed my mind). My understanding is that for the foreseeable future anyone who wants to use a programmable quantum computer (QC) is probably going to have to write a program on a normal computer to prepare the data/problem before inputting it into the QC. I don't know about you but it I needed to write a small program every time I wanted to use my QC program I would probably think Python a good choice of language for that part of the process. Oscar _______________________________________________ Tutor maillist - Tutor@python.org To unsubscribe or change subscription options: https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/tutor
