It is hoped that in the future with the advent of quantum computing that fundamental operations on a computer will have arbitrarily high precision. Moreover, that even with such high precision, computation times with be realistic. An important concept in Numerical Analysis is ill-conditioning.
For instance it is common to call the following problem, an ill-conditioned problem:
Finding the roots of a quadratic polynomial. The example is from Datta, BN Numerical Linear Algebra and Applications SIAM, Second edition (2010)
$ z^2-2z+1=0 \rightarrow z^2-2.0001z+1=0 $
since a relatively small change in the polynomial coefficients can cause a much larger perturbation in the polynomial roots.
However the ill-conditioning doesn't seem to be part of the problem because in arbitrarily high precision we have the quadratic formula allowing us to compute the roots. The ill-conditioning seems to be caused by working in finite precision which is not inherent to the problem.
Researchers often talk about the difference between an ill-conditioned problem and an ill-conditioned method of solving. This distinction seems to be entirely blurred to me.
To help clarify the situation I have two closely related questions:
Is ill-conditioning an issue in arbitrarily high precision?
Is there an ill-conditioned problem which remains ill-conditioned even in infinite precision computing?
