$100,000 If You Can Prove Quantum Computers Impossible

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[citation][nom]Trwoodward[/nom]I'm not sure why so many people think you can't prove a negative. Spend ten minutes googling and you'll realise that's not correct.[/citation]
Part of the problem that we have here is that "impossible" is a BIG word. You can never state something is impossible because you can never know with absolute certainty that it is truly impossible. It would be more correct to say that with our current understanding and employing all available data and techniques, it has been determined that X is not possible.

Consider, for the brief tick of the geologic clock that is human history, how much of our body of knowledge has changed. Hell, consider just in the last 100 years how much our body of knowledge has changed. Knowing this, would you really want to make a bet that something is truly impossible? Or would you rather take the safe bet and say, as I originally did, that something is only impossible until it's not?
 
[citation][nom]jellico[/nom]This is a sucker's bet. It is fundamental logic that you CANNOT prove a negative. Something is only impossible until it is not.[/citation]
Poppycock.

A famous proof attributed to Euclid is the proof that there is no largest prime number. I won't go into the actual proof here, but the general technique to prove this negative is commonly used. Basically, in order to prove this negative, the proof first assumes that there is a largest prime number, and then shows how this assumption leads to a direct contradiction of logic. Since the positive assertion is shown to be false, the negative is thus proven to be true.
 
[citation][nom]mildgamer001[/nom]you can prove a negative. For this particular example, try EVERY (and i mean EVERY) possible way of creating the thing, if none work, it is impossible, there just proved its impossible, mind Furked yet mr you cant prove a negative?[/citation]
But how do you know when you have tried every possible way? Unless you know everything then you can't say you tried every possible way, there will almost always be another way once technology advances. Not being able to do something now does not mean impossible it just means we can't do it with our level of technology.
 
I can prove that it's impossible to prove something impossible. To be able to do so would imply 100% certainty of future occurrences and events which has been proven impossible due to something something uncertainty principle.
 
[citation][nom]jellico[/nom]This is a sucker's bet. It is fundamental logic that you CANNOT prove a negative. Something is only impossible until it is not.[/citation]

Actually, in this case, one wouldn't be "proving a negative." It is perfectly reasonable to follow physical theories and believe that a particular thing is not possible based on that theory. For example, it is accepted that the uncertainty principle prevents us from knowing the simultaneous position and momentum of a particle to arbitrary precision... we have all of the physical evidence in the world based on a mathematical model that "proves" the uncertainty principle.

The point is, this was all that was asked for. He would accept "proof" by the same scientific standard that is applied to all theories. He wouldn't do this thinking to himself "HAHA I'll never have to pay because they can never TECHNICALLY prove a negative..."
 
[citation][nom]alidan[/nom]i can prove that 1+1 does not equal 3im assuming that the same principals are at work... you also have to imagine that if you wanted to get a government grant for quantum computer research would be a hell of allot easier to get if you could also say that the greatest minds in the world are working to disprove the possibilities, so far they have come up with nothing.[/citation]
1+1 sure can = 3. 1 man + 1 woman = 1 man 1 woman 1 baby = 3. There, proved you wrong.
 
[citation][nom]DaddyW123[/nom]1+1 sure can = 3. 1 man + 1 woman = 1 man 1 woman 1 baby = 3. There, proved you wrong.[/citation]
Adding something to the left side of an equation is only possible if you already know what it equals. You're not being clever by adding a number where one never existed.
 
[citation][nom]husker[/nom]Poppycock.A famous proof attributed to Euclid is the proof that there is no largest prime number. I won't go into the actual proof here, but the general technique to prove this negative is commonly used. Basically, in order to prove this negative, the proof first assumes that there is a largest prime number, and then shows how this assumption leads to a direct contradiction of logic. Since the positive assertion is shown to be false, the negative is thus proven to be true.[/citation]
This is not proving that a largest prime number does not exist, what this is proving is that there is no limit to the value of a prime number - which - in fact, simply means that what you are proving is that prime numbers do exist, ad infinitum, no matter how large they are. It is a completely different proof.
 
If there is no end of a series of prime numbers, how can there be a largest one? Whichever is picked as the largest, I can just pick the next one.
 
[citation][nom]rosen380[/nom]If there is no end of a series of prime numbers, how can there be a largest one? Whichever is picked as the largest, I can just pick the next one.[/citation]
Yes, you can and then you could pick the next largest and the next and the next. It is what is called in mathematics an infinite series. Calculating the primes, as they get larger, is the trick. There is a distributed computing project that does that.
 
I understand that. But if you prove that "there is no limit to the value of a prime number", how is that NOT proof that there is no largest prime number??
 
Why are so many people wrongly claiming you can't disprove stuff in this world? Science and mathematics pretty much depend on disproving theories. There are at least two easy ways you can disprove something: assume it is true and reach a contradiction, or observe something that your theory forbids from ever happening, every scientist or mathematician knows this and can give you plenty of examples.
 
@rosen380: you are right and they don't know what they're talking about.

P.S. people who want an example of a quantum mechanics related disproof of a theory should look up "Bell's theorem".
 
Perhaps this may seem odd to hear in a THG forum, but I've worked on an NP problem described by Scott Aaronson (the 3-color map problem) and found that a combination intelligent tree pruning and statistical search indexing yields a yes/no result in a time-frame that is not NP. I've only tested this on smaller maps (50 US states), so I could be wrong with much larger maps. Here is what Scott says (if your still interested):

"But what about NP? Contrary to widespread belief, NP does not stand for “Non
Polynomial-Time,” but for a technical concept called “Nondeterministic Polynomial-
Time.” (Yes, I know: when it comes to weird acronyms, computer scientists could put
any Pentagon office to shame.) You can think of NP as the class of problems for which a
valid solution can be recognized in polynomial time. For example, let’s say you wanted
to color a map with three colors, so that no two countries sharing a border were colored
the same [see Figure]. With only a few countries, this is easy to do by trial and error, but
as more countries are added, the number of possible colorings becomes astronomical. On
the other hand, if you simply gave the coloring job to your grad student, then when the
answer came back after the end of eternity, you could quickly tell whether or not your
student had succeeded: you’d just have to look at the map, and check whether any two
neighboring countries were colored the same. This is why the map-coloring problem is
in NP."
 
One of the main obstacles to quantum computing is the problem of quantum decoherence, which causes loss of unitary (and, more specifically, reversibility) of the steps of the quantum algorithm. Decoherence times for candidate systems, in particular the transverse relaxation time (in the terminology used in the technology of nuclear magnetic resonance and magnetic resonance imaging) is typically between nanoseconds and seconds at low temperatures. Error rates are typically proportional to the ratio of operating time against decoherence time, so that any operation should be completed in a time much shorter than the decoherence time. If the error rate is low enough, it is possible to effectively use quantum error correction, which itself would be possible calculation times longer than the time of decoherence and, in principle, arbitrarily long. Is often cited an error rate of 10-4 limit, below which is supposed to be possible the effective implementation of quantum error correction. Another major problem is scalability, especially given the substantial increase in qubits needed for any calculation involving the correction of errors. For none of the currently proposed design is trivial able to handle a high enough number of qubits to solve computationally interesting today.
 
If you were to give evidence and prove that the following is true : "You cannot proove a negative"... you would be prooving a negative so doesnt that defeat your argument aleady?

sure you can say it... but if you truly believe it with evidence then you are intoxicated or just blind
 
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