> “where else could the computation have happened, if it wasn’t being farmed out to parallel universes?”
Right. I’m definitely a layman here but as a CS generalist this rings out as narrow-minded to me, biased towards the way we designed physically and then mathematically formalized “computation”.
Not that I have anything against multiverses but.. if I had to choose between “Turing-style computation happened, but needed parallel universes to do so” and “what happened is something counter-intuitive and insufficiently understood about the universe we inhabit” I would bet on the latter.
I'm an actual physicist here. Not in quantum computers, but that was my advisor's field and I've kept paying attention in the years since. Your intuition here is correct, I believe. Classical computer science deals with information processing limits of devices constructed using the classical physics laws of Newton and Maxwell. Quantum physics introduces new elements that permit new kinds of information processing machines, which have no obligation to be constrained by classical law.
I don't know of any computer scientists, including the quantum-information-theorists, who think that QTMs can compute something that classical TMs cannot. That is, QM cannot solve undecidable problems.
> Quantum physics introduces new elements that permit new kinds of information processing machines, which have no obligation to be constrained by classical law.
Question then becomes, how do you build such non-constrained machines? Also, how do you confirm that such machines—or even small scale prototypes—are not constrained by classic laws of physics?
> Question then becomes, how do you build such non-constrained machines? Also, how do you confirm that such machines—or even small scale prototypes—are not constrained by classic laws of physics?
By doing the math of many physics calculations to design a setup that will make these quantum phenomena stable enough to be useful, then building it and seeing if prediction matches reality.
Rule #1 is that technologists must pretend that they understand what they are doing. Woo-woo is fine as long as you can get your peers to play along with you.
Right. I’m definitely a layman here but as a CS generalist this rings out as narrow-minded to me, biased towards the way we designed physically and then mathematically formalized “computation”.
Not that I have anything against multiverses but.. if I had to choose between “Turing-style computation happened, but needed parallel universes to do so” and “what happened is something counter-intuitive and insufficiently understood about the universe we inhabit” I would bet on the latter.