Until this week, the only common calculation where quantum computation promised exponential gains was the factoring of large numbers, which isn’t that useful outside cryptography. In a paper appearing today in Physical Review Letters, however, RLE researchers in Seth Lloyd’s group present a new algorithm that could bring the same type of efficiency to systems of linear equations — whose solution is crucial to image processing, video processing, signal processing, robot control, weather modeling, genetic analysis and population analysis, to name just a few applications. «more»
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Quantum computing may actually be useful
W. M. Keck Foundation Center for Extreme Quantum Information Theory (xQIT)