“Sigh, every civilization that discovers quantum computing inevitably does this at least once when they first figure out how to bang the rocks together…”

1) If you mean that D-Wave does not have a general-purpose quantum computer, you are correct, but the rest of your point is misleading. A general-purpose quantum computer is one that could act as a universal Turing machine, and there are no logical or physical obstacles to that.

2) People have been arguing for years that Moore’s law is rubbish. And yet the exponential increases still continue, despite everyone’s hot air. The future will tell.

3) That depends on your interpretation of the quantum world, Daniel. How does a single photon of light interfere with itself? Even the simplest accounts of quantum phenomena can’t get away from the idea that there is more than one copy of the world that is encountering itself at the smallest scales. Do you know something that scientists around the world do not?

Harrumph.

Religion, on the other hand, is just made up – nothing relies on it to be true, other than faith.I’m a total arm-chair scientist though so trust me at your own risk.

It measures something that happens in a counterfactual world. You’ll have a hard time convincing me that this counterfactual world isn’t real, since it has real, measurable consequences. In other words, if that world weren’t real, the quantum result wouldn’t exist.

There is, It’s called “interference”.

AI isn’t an engineering problem, it’s a conceptual one – even if we had infinite resources, we don’t know what we should build with them.  And we didn’t have the slightest idea how hard the problem was until we tried it.  Possibly we still don’t.

Predictions about quantum computers are of a qualitatively different kind than those about AI: We have a mathematical model of quantum computing, we know (and can measure) what needs to be done, we just have to do it. Moreover, we can measure exactly how quickly we are making progress. This was not the case for AI: what failed us there was that we did not understand the problem and had no way of measuring how close we were getting.

my understanding about multiple universes is different from what people would quantify as the classic dimensions, our universe has 4 dimensions for certain and probably around 11.  The only relation between dimensions and parallel universes is you’d have to travel in a dimension outside the classic 4 to reach a parallel universe.  people often interchange the 2 words in sci-fi when they don’t mean the same thing at all.

…but to be honest the math of multiple universes and most the math used in quantum computing is at my upper limits or beyond what i’m currently able of wrapping my noodle around, so i don’t really have any answers, just some sorta understandings.  others may be able to better answer your questions.  cheers. :-)

I’m pretty skeptical of String Theory.  I think Loop Quantum Gravity is a better research direction, since it makes testable predictions.  String theory has had a long time to develop, and still doesn’t have any predictive power, nor is it feasibly testable.  The String Theories we understand, we know are wrong, and there are 10^500 or so others that haven’t been characterized.  The landscape and anthropic principle are no better than creationism in their logical consistency, and don’t belong in science so much as in a class on mythology.

I know, let the hate mail begin.

Simple model, the a playing card stood on end will fall in both directions. Complex model, a chain reaction will cause the card to fall one way or another.

Speed is just a measure of movement over time. The upper limit for movement is the speed of light, and I couldn’t tell you what the upper limit of time is (only that time itself is a variable force, in much the same way gravity is).