SAI_Peregrinus

SAI_Peregrinus t1_iwhcom7 wrote

Perpetual motion is fine, perpetual motion you can extract enirgy from isn't. An object in a stable orbit with no drag (hypothetical truly empty space) around another object would never stop or slow down.

A time crystal is a harmonic oscillator that neither loses nor gains energy while oscillating. It's "perpetual motion" in the "orbits forever" sense, not the "free energy" sense. Also has nothing to do with quantum computers.

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SAI_Peregrinus t1_iwhc0ph wrote

Time crystals have no direct relation to quantum computers.

Quantum computers currently are very limited, but may be able to eventually compute Fourier Transforms in an amount of time that's a polynomial function of the input size (aka polynomial time), even for large inputs. That would be really cool! There are a few other problems they can solve for which there's no known classical polynomial time algorithm, but the Quantum Fourier Transform (QFT) is the big one. AFAIK nobody has yet managed to even factor the number 21 with a quantum computer, so they're a tad impractical still. Also there's no proof that classical computers can't do everything quantum computers can do just as efficiently (i.e. that BQP ≠ P), but it is strongly suspected.

Quantum annealers like D-wave's do exist now, but solve a more limited set of problems, and can't compute the QFT. It's not certain whether they're even any faster than classical computers.

I've made several enormous simplifications above.

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