From the latest Scott Aaronson
Apr. 7th, 2026 09:39 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dmm scottaaronson.blog/?p=9668
The wise child asks, “what are the main classes of problems that are currently known to admit superpolynomial quantum speedups?” To this child, you can talk about quantum simulation and finding hidden structures in abelian and occasionally nonabelian groups, as well as Forrelation, glued trees, HHL, and DQI—explaining how the central challenge has been to find end-to-end speedups for non-oracular tasks.
The wicked child asks, “so can I buy a quantum computer right now to help me pick stocks and search for oil and turbocharge LLMs, or is this whole thing basically a fraud?” To this child you answer: “the quantum computing people who seek you as their audience are frauds.”
The simple child asks, “what is quantum computing?” You answer: “it’s a strange new way of harnessing nature to do computation, one that dramatically speeds up certain tasks, but doesn’t really help with others.”
And to the child who doesn’t know how to ask—well, to that child you don’t need to bring up quantum computing at all. That child is probably already fascinated to learn classical stuff.
The wise child asks, “what are the main classes of problems that are currently known to admit superpolynomial quantum speedups?” To this child, you can talk about quantum simulation and finding hidden structures in abelian and occasionally nonabelian groups, as well as Forrelation, glued trees, HHL, and DQI—explaining how the central challenge has been to find end-to-end speedups for non-oracular tasks.
The wicked child asks, “so can I buy a quantum computer right now to help me pick stocks and search for oil and turbocharge LLMs, or is this whole thing basically a fraud?” To this child you answer: “the quantum computing people who seek you as their audience are frauds.”
The simple child asks, “what is quantum computing?” You answer: “it’s a strange new way of harnessing nature to do computation, one that dramatically speeds up certain tasks, but doesn’t really help with others.”
And to the child who doesn’t know how to ask—well, to that child you don’t need to bring up quantum computing at all. That child is probably already fascinated to learn classical stuff.
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Date: 2026-04-07 01:49 pm (UTC)The standard examples people are typically looking at are factorization into primes (unknown whether the speedup is better than polynomial, because we don't know the complexity of factorization) and search (quadratic speedup).
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