Quantum Computing: Revolutionizing the Future of Technology

Do you want to learn about quantum computing and what is the market scenario? Don’t worry!!

This blog is intended to provide an overview on quantum computing basics and try to answer some of the questions, like: What is Quantum computing? What are the companies trying to build a quantum computer? It’s application areas, and why is it becoming so popular etc.

Let’s get started!!

What is Quantum computing:

Classical computers use the laws of mathematics and quantum computers use the laws of physics. A classical computer performs operations using classical “bits” — these “bits” can be in only one of two states: “0” OR “1.” In contrast, a quantum computer uses ‘quantum bits,’ or ‘qubits’. These qubits can have a value of “0”, “1,” or both “0 AND 1” at the same time, thanks to the quantum principle of superposition. This capability allows quantum computers to solve certain types of complex problems that are intractable for conventional computers.

We can describe the difference between classical computing and quantum computing with the example of a coin. In classical computing, information is stored in bits with two states, 0 or 1 (heads or tails). In quantum computing, information is stored in quantum bits (qubits) that can be any state between 0 and 1 or similar to a spinning coin that can be both heads and tails at the same time. The information contained in qubit is much richer than the information contained in a classical bit.

Why is it becoming so popular?

Quantum computer has the ability to compute at a much faster speed than the classical computer. Problem of certain nature, which can take years to solve on a current generation supercomputer, can take just hours on a quantum computer. In other words, quantum computers have exponential acceleration speed than classical computers. This doesn’t mean that it can solve all the problems which can be solved on classical computers. Quantum computers though it is a not a replacement for classical computers it has a certain unique characteristic which helps solve problems of certain kind and exponential nature.

What quantum computers exist today?

There are many companies trying to build the quantum computer like IBM, Google, Intel, Microsoft, D wave. There is no standard approach defined to build a quantum computer since it is in a very early stage of development. Different companies are following different approaches. There’s a race going on among companies — a race to prove something called “quantum supremacy.” Quantum supremacy is essentially the test that validates that the computer you have is in fact a quantum computer.

1. IBM: IBM has launched IBM Q as the commercial quantum computer. In 2016 IBM has provided the cloud-based access to everyone and also provided development toolkit named as QISKit (Quantum information science Kit). In 2016, IBM has made this quantum platform accessible to researchers and developers around the world. This is only a start. Recently IBM has announced a 50 qubits quantum computer and working towards building much larger one in the years to come.
2. D- Waves: D waves is the only company producing and selling commercial quantum computer from 2010. These are not a universal quantum computer. They are being used for specific purposes, such as optimization, sampling, anomaly detection, and image analysis.
3. Google Research: Google invested in D-wave along with NASA partnership in 2013. Google has 9 Qubit Quantum computer in 2013. In 2017, in collaboration with researchers from University of California Santa Barbara, Google demonstrated a proof-of-concept 50-qubit quantum computer.
4. Microsoft: Microsoft launched its “Station Q” in 2005, a research lab focused on quantum computing. In 2017, Microsoft announced the launch of a new coding language and computing simulators for quantum computing.
5. Intel: Intel has collaboration with QuTech Netherland institute. In October 2017, Intel has launched 17-qubit superconducting test chip. After two months, Intel unveiled “Tangle Lake,” a 49-qubit superconducting quantum test chip.
6. Rigretti: Rigretti is startup contributing to the quantum revolution Founded in 2014. Rigetti announced its 8-qubit chip and a software environment, called Forest.

Now that you know all these concepts, what are challenges companies are facing to build Quantum computer?

The most challenging task is to maintain a stable qubit state in order to read the information because qubits are fragile in nature and keep on changing their states and characteristics. To achieve the stable state, Quantum computers are being operated at very low temperature to slow down the movement of qubits. It is very difficult to maintain the stable state, as the result, quantum experiments are always giving the different probabilistic answer.

Some examples of quantum algorithms:

1. Grover’s algorithm is a quantum algorithm for searching an unsorted database with N entries in O(N1/2) time and using O(logN) storage space (see big O notation). It was invented by Lov Grover in 1996.
2. Shor’s algorithm is quantum algorithm for integer factorization formulated in 1994. Informally, it solves the following problem: given an integer N, find its prime factors.

The simplest example of how a quantum computer can solve the problem:

Problem statement: Searching for an element in an array.
Classical computer: It will search element one by one.
Quantum computer: It has a special algorithm named as Grover algorithm, where input i.e searching element passed through each designed quantum gates. Direction and magnitude of each array element will change according to the quantum gates. The correct number array state will be containing the higher probability values and rest become smaller probability state.

Application areas:

Quantum computing has various application areas like machine learning, chemistry, medicine, cryptography, financial modeling, and weather forecasting etc. one of the interesting focus is in the area of personalized medicine and drug development, healthcare, and pharmaceutical companies could use quantum computers to model complex molecular interactions, such as simulating chains of chemical reactions to create new ways to cure cancer.

Some useful links:

1. IBM Q open access cloud-based simulator: https://quantumexperience.ng.bluemix.net/qx/editor
2. IBM Q beginner guide: https://quantumexperience.ng.bluemix.net/qx/tutorial?sectionId=beginners-guide&page=introduction

Thank you for reading the blog 🙂