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What is Quantum Computing?
May 1, 2019
Future of Tech
The Summary:
Quantum physics describes the behaviour of atoms and fundamental particles (like electrons and photons). A quantum computer operates by controlling the behaviour of these particles in a way that is completely different from our regular computers, allowing for incredibly compact data and groundbreaking processing speeds.
They likely won’t replace our normal computers but instead will work in parallel as an additional tool when needed. Much like you wouldn’t use a car to get from your bedroom to your bathroom, it would be a bit excessive.
The tech is still in its early stages, but expect steady growth over the next decade.
The Promise:
Unbreakable encryption: Quantum uncertainty could be used to create the most private encryption keys ever: potentially used for banking, sending private messages or potentially civilian ballots. Hackers would have to break the laws of quantum physics in order to copy a key perfectly.
Drug Discovery: the design and analysis of molecules for drug development is a challenging problem today and that’s because accurately describing and calculating all of the quantum properties of all the atoms in a molecule is a computationally difficult task, even for our supercomputers. But a quantum computer could do better as it operates using the same quantum properties as the molecules it’s trying to simulate, making it excellent for simulating nature. So future large scale quantum simulations, which are currently impossible, could be used for drug development to treat disease like alzheimer's.
Teleportation of information: the ability to instantly transmit information from one location to another without physically transferring the information. Qbits have the ability to become “entangled” which means that changes in one particle can istantaneously impact another and that creates a channel for teleportation. It’s already been demonstrated in research labs and could be part of a future quantum internet.
The Breakdown:
A regular computer stores information in a series of 0’s and 1’s. Different kinds of information, such as numbers, text, and images can be represented in this way using different combinations e.g 01000001 = the letter “A”. These 0s and 1s are stored as individual “bit” states which can either be one or the other. To make it easier to imagine we’ll use a coin as an analogy. Imagine that the 0 bit state is tails and the 1 bit state is heads. Each combination of heads and tails will then represent something specific and that forms the base instructions for everything our computers do.
As you can imagine, these long chains of 0s and 1s can take up a lot of memory space and take a long time for computers to read through if we want to solve very large, complicated problems. Just like your phone can run out of storage, we’ve reached a physical barrier to our computational power. There are certain kinds of problems that even our supercomputers can’t practically solve because of it.
Quantum computers change the rules. They use quantum bits (qbits) which have a more fluid, non-binary property. Instead of just having heads and tails we can actually spin the coin so it doesn’t have to be one or the other. It’s simultaneously a combination of both (e.g 50% heads and 50% tails or 30% heads and 70% tails), a superposition. Allowing a qbit to hold much more data as it can simultaneously be both states. Qbits can also mimic each other in real time through a process called entanglement even when they’re a large distance apart.
So a quantum computer isn’t just a more powerful version of our current computers. Just like a light bulb isn’t a better candle, it’s a completely different technology based on deeper scientific understanding. Quantum computers are a new kind of device based on the science of quantum physics and just like the light bulb transformed society, quantum computers have the potential to impact so many aspects of our lives.
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