Facilitate collaboration?
I love this part:
"Researchers have complained Uncle Sam hasn't done enough to facilitate collaboration and bridge the gap between educators, developers, and scientists involved in algorithms and developing hardware."
This being the US, there aren't any blockages here for the US Gov't to remove.
Pick up a phone. Write an email. Send up smoke signals. No one is stopping you.
If you read about something interesting, you can follow up yourself. Why do you need something special (ie Government money) to do that? There are a wealth of official journals, blogs, websites, periodicals etc. dedicated to quantum computing. It's a small enough community that most of them likely are familiar with each others' work and can reach out if they want. The biggest blockage I could see would be private companies being proprietary with their research. Like it or not, D-Wave isn't sharing with Intel, Intel isn't sharing with Microsoft, Microsoft isn't sharing with Google.
There are likely insights each of them COULD share with each other, but they won't because they all want to capitalize first on what their research produces. But the Government won't stop that. That's healthy competition and as long as companies are spending the money on all that skull sweat, the taxpayers aren't. No way in hell the Gov't will step in at this point.
