On Fri, Sep 15, 2017 at 08:51:07PM +1200, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:
On Fri, 15 Sep 2017 19:34:08 +1200, Michael Cree wrote:
The probability of it returning true (or false) is dependent on the mixture. That's most certainly not analogue: it's something fundamentally different.
Call it “stochastic analog” or “Monte Carlo analog”, then.
And you would be completely wrong. The only outcomes you can measure from a qubit is one of two states: true or false. That's not the case of analogue even if it is stochastic, monte carlo, or whatever.
Put it this way: if quantum computers really were digital, then they could be used to solve number-theoretic problems. But it appears they can’t.
What makes you think a quantum computer [1] can not? Cheers Michael. [1] Here I mean the theoretical conception of a quantum computer just like the universal Turing machine is to a conventional computer. Realising a practical implementation of a quantum computer is certainly proving challenging with current technology, but that is a different issue than whether it is analogue or not.