According to the leading advisory firm Gartner, by 2023, 20% of organizations will be budgeting for quantum computing projects. That's only two years away! So, just what is quantum computing?
If you're like me, your head starts spinning when you hear about terms like quantum and entanglement and superposition. It sounds great and looks cool when you're watching movies like Ant-Man with those subatomic scenes in the quantum realm. But what does all that have to do with computers? and Why is everyone excited about it?
I’ve compiled information from the experts – the scientists at companies that have built their own quantum computers like IBM, Amazon, Google, and Microsoft, and hope to distill that information in a way that makes sense to the rest of us.
Let’s start with the basics.
The computers that we use daily at the very lowest level operate in binary - 1s and 0s. That’s how data's stored and how calculations are done. You may have heard of something called a bit – a binary digit – that can only hold a 1 OR a 0 which can represent true or false, or on or off.
Quantum computers deal with something call qubits. A Qubit can be a 1 or 0 or a superposition of both 0 and 1. Superposition means it can be in both states. How’s that possible?
Let's say you have a coin - heads / tails. Let's say heads is 1 and tails is 0. When you flip that coin and it's spinning, it's both heads and tails at the same time - that's superposition.
Another concept that you hear about is entanglement. Einstein famously called it spooky action at a distance.
When qubits are considered entangled, there's a unique relationship between them. Even if you separated the qubits by thousands of miles they're still linked. That means any action taken on one qubit impacts the other no matter how long the distance is between them.
While quantum computers won't replace your e-mail or web client, superposition and entanglement allow a quantum computer to calculate the really difficult problems that our classic computers are having trouble with.
Dr. Talia Gershon from IBM Research gave a great talk at Maker Faire Bay Area in 2017 discussing a particular problem with classical computing. She provided an optimization problem. Let’s say you can seat 10 people around a table. What are the different configurations you can have? Well, it’s 10 factorial which is 3.6 million configurations. The number of possibilities increase exponentially when you start adding additional guests. You can solve small versions of this problem with classical computing but you can’t solve big versions of this problem very well without using quantum computing.
So that covers the key concepts I wanted to chat about today.
We talked about classical computers, quantum computing, superposition, entanglement, and finally how all this will benefit our world.
The next several decades are going to be an exciting time when it comes it to quantum technology. It’s time to learn as much as possible!
References
IBM Research. (2017, May 31). A beginner's guide to quantum computing [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S52rxZG-zi0
Panetta, K. (2019, April 18). The CIO’s Guide to Quantum Computing. https://www.gartner.com/smarterwithgartner/the-cios-guide-to-quantum-computing