As I mentioned yesterday, I’m on my way to Vancouver for the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), where the future of quantum computers is on the agenda.
I’m looking forward catching up with is Scott Aaronson of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who has been in the news lately because of his $100,000 challenge. The mathematical physicist is offering this princely sum to anyone who can convince him that scalable quantum computers are impossible. This might seem like easy money – after all, physicists have struggled for years to build even the most primitive quantum processors, and scaling these up to make a working quantum computer seems a tall order.
But Aaronson isn’t talking about hardware, instead he wants you to disprove the underlying quantum physics that would make a quantum computer tick. “This is a bet on the validity of quantum mechanics as it’s currently understood,” he told me recently. Can he raise the money? Yes, and he even thinks it would be well spent because disproving some or all of quantum mechanics would lead to a revolution in physics. Has he received any serious entries so far? No, but there is no time limit on the challenge so get your ideas to Aaronson.
In this week’s Facebook poll we are asking if you think Aaronson will hang on to his hard-earned cash?