As a side track, how far away are we from "quantum cloud services" that I can pass arguments to and receive output from in exchange for a monthly or per-resource-used fee?
What types of problems are quantum computers anticipated to solve? I've only heard about how they are able to break certain cryptographical algorithms that were designed long before quantum was even a thought.
A lot of companies say they are near QCaaS - quantum computing as a service, on the cloud.
In reality, they can't do this until they have a working quantum computer of an interesting size.
For now, it's limited to toy-size QCs, which can be simulated faster and cheaper using an ordinary computer. So if they are on a cloud server, it's more for curiosity value only. They aren't actually useful.
There's a lot of buzz and hope and money going into it, but nobody knows with certainty if it's even possible to build one of a useful size.
The "quantum supremacy" claim which happened already was genuine and deserves accolades, but it turns out only to be useful on a very contrived kind of problem. The clever part, in a way, was figuring out a suitably contrived problem, to show that quantum supremacy is technically possible without resulting in a useful quantum computer, and it doesn't run any of the standard quantum circuits.
You can do this today with DWave, Rigetti and Xanadu. I've used D-Wave myself, signing up for their LEAP platform is inexpensive (possibly free for a small amount of use, I'm not sure about their current offering).
There are different implementations of "quantum computing" which are appropriate for different types of problems. Google and Wikipedia will teach you about them, for example quantum annealing vs. universal quantum computing.
I address the first part of your question in another comment on this post [1] (disclaimer, I'm a D-Wave employee and only talk about our offerings).
As for what types of problems: D-Wave's quantum computers (and adiabatic quantum computers in general) are best suited for optimization problems. Some examples are scheduling, graph coloring, and other NP-hard problems.
AFAIK quantum computing, as a whole, is very far from breaking any kind of interesting crypto.
AWS Braket is in preview, so should provide what you are asking for in the near future. QC hardware manufacturers generally also offer their own cloud access mechanisms.
Very cool! I have attached the FAQ for this service as now I have a new rabbit hole to jump down.
I'm sure that once the electrical engineering side of things is in place and commercial machines are being manufactured (custom or model based design), it will become a new consulting domain for software engineers to work in.
What types of problems are quantum computers anticipated to solve? I've only heard about how they are able to break certain cryptographical algorithms that were designed long before quantum was even a thought.