Quantum computer vs supercomputer is no contest

It’s hard to conceive of a calculation that would be difficult for a supercomputer. Isn’t it? Actually, no. Imagine being a traffic controller tasked with moving planes around efficiently on the ground at a big airport. Imagine you had to optimise gate assignments for 50 planes at 100 gates. The number of possible arrangements of those planes at any given time is 10 to the hundredth power, which is more than the number of atoms in the visible universe. According to the WSJ no conventional computer could keep track of them all at once – but a quantum computer could. The industry’s still struggling with the fact that rather than bits these machines use qubits, which have to be kept utterly still and close to zero Kelvin. So what about people, experience and intuition? Well, once they grow big enough, quantum computers should be able to solve in minutes optimisation problems that would take supercomputers millions of years. Never mind people.