Do you know what killed Polaroid? How about Kodak? What about Blockbuster? Borders? What happened to these once upon a time market leading companies? They failed to read the market right! They missed out on opportunities. They had a fixed mindset and didn’t respond to market changes. They didn’t innovate!
Today I’m going to talk about specific use cases for quantum computing and why our organization needs to be at the forefront of this technology.
I’ve teamed up with the leading quantum computing scientists at universities, and companies like IBM, Amazon, and Google to allow us access to their knowledge base and to experiment with their quantum computers. I will also be referencing global business and innovation leaders.
Though the groundwork for quantum computing was laid out over 40 years ago, the last few years have seen several companies declaring they have reached what’s known as quantum supremacy. Let’s talk about what that means and dive into some practical applications of this technology.
Last week we talked about the basics of quantum computing and reviewed a generic optimization problem where we had 10 people around a table and calculated that there would be 3.6 million different configurations to seat them. Classical computers can solve small versions of this problem, but larger problems would need quantum computers to efficiently solve them.
Quantum supremacy happens when a quantum computer actually solves a problem that a classical computer can’t tackle very quickly. Google in October 2019 declared that they reached quantum supremacy by solving a difficult problem in 200 seconds as compared to the then fastest classical super computer by IBM which would take 10,000 years. There was a back and forth with IBM claiming it wouldn’t take 10,000 years and would only take two and a half days, but the fact remains that quantum computers can solve these difficult problems much more quickly.
Let’s dive into some real world use cases.
Lov Grover – a computer scientist – designed in 1996 a quantum algorithm called Grover’s Search which was finally implemented in 2017. Let’s say you need to find an item from a list and that list has a trillion items. On average, it would take a classical computer about a week to find that one item. With a quantum computer, it’d take about a second. This can help our organization’s researchers drastically reduce the time to find correlations in our data sets. Months of effort turn into hours.
Here’s another example.
We talk about cybersecurity in our organization every single day. We train our staff to not fall for phishing attacks. We even have the most stringent password policies. Now could a quantum computer program potentially crack our passwords? Andrew Yang in 2019 when he was running for the presidential election tweeted after Google’s quantum supremacy announcement that, “no code is uncrackable.” He’s partially right, some of our encryption algorithms are vulnerable to what I call quantum hackery – they just don’t have computers with enough qubits at this stage in time. In fact, this is such a big deal, that the National Institutes of Standards and Technology or NIST has an on-going project to find and standardize quantum-resistant cryptographic algorithms. If our organization participate with NIST, not only will we be learning from other experts, but the community will respect and look to us as future-thinking leaders. Another benefit is that we’ll be attracting the best talent to our teams.
Let’s jump back to optimization.
There’s a famous traveling salesperson problem which asks “Given a list of cities and the distances between each pair of cities, what is the shortest possible route that visits each city exactly once and returns to the origin city?” With just 15 cities, the number of possibilities is more than 87 billion. Volkswagen has partnered up with D-Wave – a Canadian quantum computing company to solve these kinds of travel and traffic related problems. In fact Volkswagen issued a news release that they were working together in Beijing, Barcelona, and Lisbon to send buses on routes tailored to real-time traffic conditions through a quantum algorithm. This type of real-time optimization is exactly what our organization’s researchers have been hoping for to quickly help areas that have been impacted by natural disasters and famine and conflict.
To sum up, we need to invest in quantum computing to stay relevant as pack leaders. We need to consistently be ahead of the curve and make sure that we’re coming up with solutions faster than our competitors. Our revenues have been shrinking year over year and that’s because the market’s saturated with small businesses talking a larger part of the pie. Our investing in quantum computing projects can turn that all around.
Let’s re-cap. If we invest in quantum computing, we can leverage algorithms that’ll bring down labor hours - reducing cost. By participating in quantum cryptography initiatives, we show our clients we’re thought leaders and attract the best talent. And finally, if we tackle and solve our current optimization problems, we’ll get aid to those who need it quickly. Does anyone have any questions?
Great. I’m excited about the next several years at our organization. Our mission is to serve the underserved. Let’s use the latest in technologies to be more efficient, solve those really hard problems, and stay relevant.
References
Arute, F., Arya, K., Babbush, R. et al. Quantum supremacy using a programmable superconducting processor. Nature 574, 505–510 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-019-1666-5
Gossett, S. 8 Quantum Computing Applications & Examples. Built In (2019). https://builtin.com/hardware/quantum-computing-applications
Grover, L. A fast quantum mechanical algorithm for database search. STOC ’96: Proceedings of the twenty-eight annual ACM symposium on Theory of Computing, 212-219 (1996). https://doi.org/10.1145/237814.237866
Thangavelu, P. (2020). Companies that failed to innovate and went bankrupt. Investopedia. https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/072115/companies-went-bankrupt-innovation-lag.asp
Volkswagen. (2019, Oct 31). Volkswagen optimizes traffic flow with quantum computers [Press release]. https://www.volkswagen-newsroom.com/en/press-releases/volkswagen-optimizes-traffic-flow-with-quantum-computers-5507
Yang, A. (2019). [@AndrewYang]. (2019, Sep 20). Google achieving quantum computing is a huge deal. It means, among many other things, that no code is uncrackable. [Tweet] Twitter. https://twitter.com/AndrewYang/status/1175200727385464832