I’m starting a PhD in a related field, and it seems like the biggest reason to be excited is simulation of small and complex physics systems, e.g. molecular interactions.
Breaking RSA/ECDSA is very cool, but doesn’t actually enable new industries or products. We’ll just shift to using different cryptography that quantum computing can’t break.
Maybe quantum key distribution will become really important in some sectors. But if you aren’t seriously worried about man-in-the-middle attacks on your communications, QKD won’t make a difference in your life.
But efficiently simulating chemical and physical interactions could open up whole industries with advancements in material science, pharmaceuticals, etc.
"But efficiently simulating chemical and physical interactions"
Are there real chances, this is going to work reliable anytime soon?
I don't know much about quantum computing, but to me it seems, I rather would bet on GPUs for large simulations (as far as I know, currently they are mostly calculated on CPUs).
If you want to faithfully capture real-time quantum effects your program’s memory and runtime scales exponentially with the number of particles. A quantum simulation scales polynomially.
Breaking RSA/ECDSA is very cool, but doesn’t actually enable new industries or products. We’ll just shift to using different cryptography that quantum computing can’t break.
Maybe quantum key distribution will become really important in some sectors. But if you aren’t seriously worried about man-in-the-middle attacks on your communications, QKD won’t make a difference in your life.
But efficiently simulating chemical and physical interactions could open up whole industries with advancements in material science, pharmaceuticals, etc.