Will I be getting a quantum computer for my birthday?
Quantum computers promise to solve problems that are nearly impossible for traditional computers. How and when will this future arrive?
Quantum computers: reading about them can hurt your brain. Circuits in cryogenic freezers operating at temperatures colder than outer space; lasers zapping atoms millions of times per second; talk of superposition and entanglement and teleportation. Technologies so powerful that they may one day unlock personalized medicine and hitherto unimagined energy solutions. Where do these things come from? What does it all mean? And how do we separate science fiction from science fact?
The idea for quantum computers originated around the 1960’s. Then, as today, quantum mechanics – the physics of atoms and subatomic particles – was baffling. Our intuitions fail us when we’re talking about the behavior of the very, very small. Some of the leading thinkers at the time had an idea: instead of trying to simulate and understand the behavior of molecules with our mathematical models, why not use other atoms to do it? Thus, the idea of a “quantum computer” was born.
Why would I care about the behavior of atoms and molecules, you might wonder? Simply put, today if you want to target a new drug, invent the next Teflon, create a new way of producing green fuels, or much more, you often need to start with an expensive lab, a few months on a supercomputer, and a lot of luck. The promise of quantum computers is to dramatically reduce or eliminate those costs while speeding up the process with much more powerful simulations.
How does that work? Today’s computers and supercomputers all rely on the ability to do lots of math very, very fast. Yet math is not everything. Consider the soap bubble – calculating the shape of a bubble using quantum mechanics could take weeks or months with our best mathematical approximations. Yet, when a child blows a soap bubble, the bubble just becomes a sphere. It’s not relying on math. Instead, it’s using physics – it’s getting to the same answer through different means. Very quickly and consistently.
Quantum computers borrow similar principles. They use physics to get answers very quickly. The challenge is that not every problem is well-suited to being solved by physics. Smart individuals around the world are currently wrestling with the question: what problems will be tractable to being solved by physics? So far, the answers seem to fall in three broad categories:
Optimization: Quantum can help fleets find the best routes to deliver packages, help optimize financial portfolios, or otherwise finding optimal solutions to complex patterns.
Machine learning: Quantum computers are demonstrating the ability to train machine learning models faster, with higher quality, on lower volumes of data.
Physical simulation: Quantum computers were created to better simulate the behavior of atoms and molecules. Future advances may give us the power to design targeted drugs, new chemicals, better catalysts and more.
Check out this video overview for more:
When will a quantum computer be doing my homework?
It turns out that making a useful quantum computer is really, really, really hard. Today’s best quantum computers are more like quantum calculators – they can solve problems one at a time and are surrounded by today’s powerful computers. Moreover, the problems they can solve at the time of this writing (Fall 2023) are still problems we can tackle with today’s computers. Why, therefore, the hullabaloo? In the 1960’s, the same things could’ve been said of the computers of the day. Yet today’s kitchen appliances can have more computing power than what was used to put men on the moon. Imagine what could be true in a few years.
That future is the cause for excitement. While people talk about “quantum supremacy” as if it were a single event, that’s not how emerging technologies work. What’s likely is that in the coming few years, we start seeing the first handful of cases where a quantum computer works better than our best classical machines. From there, as the engineering makes progress every year, more and more use cases will arise. Over time, more and more interesting problems will be solved. We’ll likely see the results of the old adage, “We overestimate what we can do in a year and underestimate what we can accomplish in a decade.”
Great, I can sit back and wait. Right?
Does this mean investigating quantum computing should join your “Top 10 list” of things to do at position #11? Tempting as that might seem, there’s a wrinkle: many in the industry have found that it takes 1-2 years of work for developers to adapt to knowing how to use quantum computers well. Banking on the idea that you can wait for proof might enable your more agile competitors to steal a march on you. That’s part of the reason that many in the global Fortune 500 have active quantum computing research or innovation programs today.
While it might not need to be everyone’s focus in your organization, it should probably be someone’s focus.
The good news is that there are likely people in your organization who are already starting to explore quantum computing for themselves. In some cases, they don’t want to miss out. In other cases, they’re curious about what they’ve read. In all cases, they have energy that you can utilize to accelerate your journey to making productive use of tomorrow’s quantum computers.
Don’t wait, or be caught unprepared. If you’re not confident of preparing by yourself, consider phoning a friend. We may not be shot into the quantum realm tomorrow, but the future tends to arrive before we know it.
— Scott Buchholz, Global Quantum Lead, Deloitte Consulting LLP
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