What comes after quantum computers?
We don't know yet. And it probably won't matter to your business anyway.
Quantum computers don’t touch everything, but the domains they do will find them necessary. The same is true of string computers.
String theory attempts to unify quantum mechanics and gravity. Other theories exist, but string theory is the most widely known. If you prefer a different framework, that’s fine. The point of this post isn’t string theory specifically, but a larger question: what does beyond-quantum computing look like? The field searching for physics underneath quantum mechanics is extremely immature, and I’m not an expert on any of it.
One difficulty with this line of thought is that both quantum computing and the research of what lies underneath are fairly immature, and one question that cannot be fully answered yet is if quantum computers are bad at certain tasks, or if it’s just this generation of quantum computers.
We can guess about the answers to this and similar questions, but the existence of quantum-inspired algorithms that provide significant speed improvements makes me think there may be the same “string-inspired algorithms”.
This is not an easy undertaking. I see two possibilities for deeper physics computing: either there is no computational paradigm to find, or the physics is too immature to see it yet. I’m assuming the second one is true for this post. I cannot foresee any deeper physics option that doesn’t have an “analog” version. Think analog classical computing or quantum annealing. So the difficulty in answering “will these computers matter to my work?” comes down to two things: our incomplete understanding of deeper physics and the immaturity of quantum computing itself.
The answer is almost certainly not. But there are areas that are exceptions.
The main area I see is nearly pure research. These computers would allow us to more deeply probe the mysteries of black holes, gravity and potentially nuclear fission. The rule of thumb I’m seeing is that the best places for “string computing” is energy at deeper levels or more extreme paradigms.
The second possibility: there are problems both quantum and classical computing are bad at. We don’t know what they are yet. Finding them requires deeper research into quantum computing itself and the physics underneath. The earliest signal from physics will come when we can narrow down which deeper physics framework is correct.
Few people will need deep use of a quantum computer. Fewer still will need to touch a string computer.
