Or that you should email one personβjust one, anywhere on the planetβwho works in quantum algorithms? Willing to bet your house? Your car? How much would it blow your mind if I told you that a standard laptop, running a halfway decent algorithm, could handle 22 cities in a fraction of a second? Did it come from the same source you consulted before you pronounced the death of Bitcoin β¦ in January ? Had you wanted to consult someone who knew the first thing about quantum computing, the subject of your column, would you have been able to use a search engine to find one?
If not, then what were you referring to? Do you, like me, consider them one of the most important venues on earth for people to be able to trust right now? Were the fact-checkers home with the flu?
Or did they trust you as a widely-published technology expert? How does one become such an expert, anyway? Update Feb. As far as I know, he has not posted any corrections to his Washington Post piece. As a result, while Wadhwa should obviously have followed the journalistic practice of checking incredible-sounding claimsβon Wikipedia if nowhere else!
As John Preskill tweeted , an excellent lesson to draw from this affair is that everyone in our field needs to be careful to say things that are true when speaking to the public. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site. Scott, I just watched your fascinating and excellent TedX talk and really appreciate your perspectives. I have read your criticisms of journalists who have had the same issue and your frustrations with the deficiency.
If you give me a better way of explaining how quantum computers work I will surely use that. Or was that intentional irony? Going by Wikipedia the total amount of money spent to fix it was on the order of a billion dollars, soβ¦.
