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AI confirms a long-suspected limit on quantum computers’ advantages
AI-powered proof has rigorously proved that using quantum computers would not have huge advantages for a whole class of mathematical problems, confirming a vastly influential conjecture.
A decades-old, vastly influential conjecture about quantum computing has finally been proven - by AI. It confirms that a whole class of mathematical problems wouldn’t be more easily solved by quantum computers.
In 1999, Scott Aaronson at the University of Texas at Austin got stuck on a question about when exactly quantum computers could excel over their conventional counterparts.
At this time, researchers knew of at least one example of a problem where the quantum approach outshone all others: Shor’s algorithm for factoring numbers. But they suspected that this hinged on the specific mathematical structure that underlies the factoring problem.
Aaronson wondered whether quantum computers could also win in the opposite case, when the problem contains little to no structure and lots of randomness instead. In 2011, he and Andris Ambainis at the University of Latvia formally conjectured that, in at least one case, the answer was negative - but they couldn’t prove it.
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