quantum computer. will it hurt chess theory?

Exactly. So solving chess would not lead to people giving up on certain openings or playing 1.c3

Tops GMs are already barely capable of understanding top engine play at this point, so there's no real danger of engines "ruining" chess except in a completely perceptual way.

btickler   Really?  You know how well top GMs understand or don't understand top engine play?

Where did you get this knowledge?      

Yeah btickler, Ponz is the only one allowed to claim special divine insight into the nature of chess and what GMs know and don't know.

llama47  I was asking where he got his knowledge of what top GMs understand ?

However you are very incorrect in your statement that I claim special divine insight into the nature of chess  and what GMs know and don't know?  

Since you know your statement is untrue--it is ,just  an  ad hominem attack.

However I do have some insight as to how some GMs think because I have played some of them and know some of them and have given advice to some  of them.

Who the heck will know all the computer solutions to every position? Maybe a person with photographic memory who plays in the top 10 in the world.  And that’s a BIG maybe. The rest of us, for sure, don’t have to worry about any of that.

Why did you use a question mark? That sentence is not a question.

Is taking everything literally part of dementia?

llama47   In English - question marks can be quite ambiguous. 

Apparently.

llama47    you should know that taking everything literally is Not part of dementia. 

Let's get back to chess and the forum question?

Is this going to turn into the forum about chess being a draw or not between you guys again?

If they start talking about it I'll unfollow.

I'm not sure why people that have no background always seem to think that they are booked up on some technology because they read some blogs/articles about it.  Those blogs and articles are often about sniffing out investors, and they are written by lay people who don't really know anything more about it than the readers do...they are heavily exaggerated, vague on details, and light on actual accomplishments/proof.

When Scientific American comes out with an article about quantum supremacy being a done deal, then we can talk .  Until then, all the post grad "studies" and "papers" put out by people trying to make a name for themselves are effectively worthless, and the buzzword articles and blogs are even worse.  Not because Scientific American is the arbiter of anything, but because they won't pounce until some breakthrough actually happens that is agreed upon by consensus.

I could write up a passable language from the instruction set myself and publish it...it wouldn't mean squat.

Nobody has said that quantum computing is a "dead end".  It's a fantastic technology, and has a ton of potential.  What they have said it is not really applicable to the problem of solving chess unless there are new and unforeseen breakthroughs.

Hoping for such breakthroughs without any solid and imminent reason to is akin to believing in magic.

Somewhat related:

The Gell-Mann Effect, also called the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect describes the phenomenon of an expert believing news articles on topics outside of their field of expertise even after acknowledging that articles written in the same publication that are within the expert's field of expertise are error-ridden and full of misunderstanding.

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I found this interesting for a slightly different reason i.e. the more you know about something the more you're aware of how much misinformation there is on the topic.

Elo ratings.  You should look into them.  A 2800 rated chess player cannot fully understand the moves made by a 3500 rated player...and before you even go there, no, a top correspondence chess player is not higher rated, they are effectively usually a master-level player utilizing a handful of 3500 rated engines (whose moves they understand *even less* than the super GMs do).

But yeah, please keep yourself from turning this into yet another "Ponz claims chess is a draw" thread .

Well, crap...I can't argue with you there.  Decoherence is a "major hurtle to be overcome"?  How does a PhD in Physics not know the difference between "hurdle" and "hurtle"?  The world is doomed...WTF.

Still, this is an opinion piece not a full article.

Read it.

He doesn't indicate HOW decoherence is to be overcome, and only addresses one form of decoherence anyway... that caused by random interaction with the environment. He makes no mention of the fact that decoherence is an unavoidable consequence of something as simple as a write-to-memory operation.

It's important to draw a distinction between these two sources of quantum decoherence:

1) That caused by random interaction with the environment. NOTE that "the environment" includes the material out of which the quantum computer itself has been constructed! Lattice vibrations can and will randomize the wave function, which is why qubits are cooled to 20 milli-kelvin (1/50th of one degree above absolute zero). Unfortunately, zero-point motion ensures that even at absolute zero, lattice vibrations (and decoherence) cannot be eliminated, only suppressed. Other sources of random decoherence include radioactivity from the material that composes the computer or its environment (including its shielding!), cosmic rays... and even virtual particle pairs. Good luck eliminating any of those, let alone all of them.

2) Decoherence imposed by the operation of the computer itself. Even something as simple as writing a value to a memory cell (or reading a value from a memory cell, or comparing two values) will cause quantum decoherence. That means that you cannot store intermediate results, nor can you use and increment counters... which means that you cannot use loops as part of your program. Nor can you make if/then logic, since you cannot compare one value to another.

I'm afraid that quantum computers will remain a niche application for a long time to come.

The telling statement for me was: 

With continued efforts, quantum computers will one day fill a niche in computing, solving certain types of problems that are classically intractable.

Talk about damning with faint praise . 

#85
2) Quantum computing allows to do all things you say you cannot.

cinc(x,e); // conditional increment
Not(e); // invert enable qubit
!cinc(x,e); // conditional decrement
Not(e); // restore enable qubit

cond qufunct demux(quconst s,qureg q) {
int i;
int n = 0;
for i=0 to #s-1 { // accumulate content of
if s[i] { n=n+2^i; } // selection register in a
} // classical variable
Not(q[n]); // flip selected output qubit
}

And here is an overview of the 23 quantum computers commercially available from IBM
https://quantum-computing.ibm.com/services?services=systems