I'm not going to try to answer the first question, as someone like Scott Aaronson, Peter Shor or John Watrous can no doubt give you a far more comprehensive answer on that front.
As regards question 2, it is important to note that quantum computers are in fact more powerful than classical computers in many instances:
- There is a rather generic polynomial speed-up gained by quantum computers over classical computers in quite a number of problems. From a complexity point of view, this is perhaps somewhat less interesting than an exponential speed-up, but is something that we can actually prove.
- Quantum communication complexity can often vary dramatically from classical communications complexity for the same problem. Again, this is something that can be proven (see for example the Mermin-GHZ game).
- Quantum queries to oracles are very often far more powerful than classical queries to the same oracle (see for example the Deutsch-Josza algorithm).
With this is mind, it is already known that quantum computers are fundamentally more powerful than classical computers. I think I would be correct in saying that the majority of physicists who work on such things would already assume that it is not possible to find a classical algorithm to efficiently simulate every quantum system, and so while a result showing that NP was contained in BQP would certainly be surprising, it would not be particularly likely to provide a breakthrough in the understanding of any particular physical phenomenon. Rather it would provide somewhat stronger evidence that quantum physics is hard to simulate.
There is no fundamental physics that is dependent on the computational complexity of simulating it, so finding an efficient quantum algorithm for an NP-complete problem would not have fundamental consequences for the correctness of our current understanding of how the universe functions (though I am inclined to agree with Scott Aaronson's suggestion that it is interesting to see if you could have physical laws emerge from computational assumptions).
これは、量子システムの断熱進化に影響を与えると言って非常に魅力的です(そして、それを示唆する答えを1つまたは2つ得るかもしれません)。 、したがって、量子コンピューターで多項式時間でSATを解くことは原則的に可能であることを示しているが、それらの特定の進化については何も言わないだろう。
最後の質問については、問題の構造を利用して多項式量子アルゴリズムを生成する例が既にありますが、そのような古典的なアルゴリズム(たとえば、因数分解)にはつながりません。したがって、現在の理解に関する限り、多項式時間量子アルゴリズムを生成するために利用可能な構造の問題は、その構造が古典的な多項式時間アルゴリズムを生成するために利用可能であることを意味しません。