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Proposal: Quantum Computing

There are many areas of quantum information that are closely related to quantum computing. A few that come to mind are quantum simulation, quantum communication, quantum cryptography, and many topics that are not so easily classified in one of such categories.

Wouldn't it make more sense for this proposal to cover the more general area of quantum information? The main reason is that the scientific community of quantum computation isn't really isolated from the rest of the quantum information community (quite the contrary actually), so that most people working in the former will likely be interested and working on the latter.

To have a site where topics of quantum computation would be on-topic but, say, questions about entanglement theory (in the context of quantum information) would be off-topic, wouldn't make much sense in my opinion.

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    I agree with the ideas that the related topics should be on topic, quantum info etc. If that means anything :) What change would reflect this better? In the description?
    – snulty
    Commented Dec 10, 2017 at 0:04
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    Partial beginnings of an answer: simulation - definitely; communication and cryptography - I'd argue that these can be written as quantum circuits, albeit with multiple registers, so yes; information is harder to answer, but the only indication so far is that there's one question with 10 upvotes on quantum information, so it looks like people are OK with that... This might be a good meta question for the beta, if we get that far :)
    – Mithrandir24601
    Commented Dec 10, 2017 at 14:35
  • @snulty tbh the general wording used for the proposal seems strange to me. Starting from why call it "quantum computing" instead of more generally "quantum information". I mean, the communities aren't really that separate. Having a site accepting questions on "quantum computing and related topics" insted of more generally questions on "quantum information" would lead to endless confusion as to what is on- or off-topic. The question pointed by Mithrandir is a good example of something related to QC that is however really a quantum information question. [continue]
    – glS
    Commented Dec 10, 2017 at 14:52
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    [continue] these kind of questions should be accepted in my opinion, because to not have them on-topic would make often quite subjective whether a given question will be on-topic or off-topic on the site. But then one can wonder why not just call the proposal "quantum information" rather than "quantum computing".
    – glS
    Commented Dec 10, 2017 at 14:55
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    The description is also kind of odd. At the present stage QC is mostly a subfield of physics, with fundamental contributions from mathematicians and theoretical computer scientists. The description mentions "engineers, scientists, programmers, and other computer professionals", which is odd at best. QC is still much more physics that engineering, and while there are people developing "quantum programming languages" that is at the present stage more of a niche topic and doesn't really represent the bulk part of the field.
    – glS
    Commented Dec 10, 2017 at 15:00
  • Well, quantum computing definitely isn't a sub-field of quantum information - OK, theoretical quantum computing could be considered as such, but there's lots of experimental and yes, even engineering work going into the field as well - the line between what's physics and what's engineering is blurry but fabricating, say, one of IBM's chips is more engineering than physics... Also, 'programmers' would include those using said chips (not a small number), not just those developing programming languages
    – Mithrandir24601
    Commented Dec 10, 2017 at 23:20
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    I might be mistaken, but I always thought that quantum computing is part of quantum information science. Anything that involves quantum encoding and processing of information seems to fall under quantum information science, as opposed to the more narrow quantum information theory. I’d be in favor of a site being about quantum information in general, not just quantum computing. The topics tend to be related and there’s no site dedicated to the other topics, so they’d have a home. I’d also personally favor the site being named “quantum information” or “quantum information and computation”.
    – Sherif F.
    Commented Mar 5, 2018 at 21:46
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    @glance, I agree about the description and I wrote a post/question about that some time ago on here.
    – Sherif F.
    Commented Mar 5, 2018 at 21:47

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