LIMITATION OF CLASSICAL COMPUTERS - Problem of Optimization

Classical computers have enabled amazing things – the internet, high performance computing, weather prediction, that fact that you can fly from one place to another, robotic automation, playing music and numerous more.

But there are stills problems we cannot solve. Let me start with two things classical computers are bad at. Maybe they can solve small version of these problems. When the problem becomes big and interesting, we just run out of the computing power.

Following is the first of the two problems –

1.      Optimization – Optimization is finding out the best solution to a problem among many possibilities.

What follows below is the picture of one of the circular tables with a seating capacity of 11 guests. Now the question is how many ways we can make them sit. The answer is 10!

The number 11 may seem so small but 10! is approximately 3.6 million. There are 3.6 million ways to arrange 11 people for dinner around a table. The truth of the matter is that every time I add one guest to the dinner table the number of seating possibilities grow exponentially. We can solve small version of this problem on classical machines, but we do not solve big version of this problem at all with classical machines/computers.

The second problem follows in the next post/article.

Regards,

DJ