The potential of quantum computing is enormous, although we would be just at the beginning of its promising career.
Google claims to have achieved quantum supremacy. He claims to have demonstrated what until now was nothing more than theory: that a computer can be created that is governed by principles of atomic physics and that its calculation capacity makes a fool of today’s best supercomputers.
As published in the journal Nature by the team of researchers from the technology giant, their new device has been able to perform in three minutes and twenty seconds an operation (the calculation of random numbers) that would take the most powerful conventional computers thousands of years. IBM, Google’s great competitor in the race to develop a quantum computer, has played down the matter: it claims that its best supercomputer is capable of performing the same calculation in two and a half days.
Google’s would not be a minor milestone. The potential of quantum computing is enormous, although we would be just at the beginning of its promising career. As explained by the Spanish scientist Juan Ignacio Cirac, director of the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics, what has just been achieved would be equivalent to the Wright brothers’ first flight. From the time it was demonstrated that a manned aircraft could fly a hundred meters until commercial airlines emerged, decades had to pass. The same is likely to happen with quantum computers.
How a quantum computer works
It would be astonishingly foolhardy to try to explain the operation of a quantum computer without even having a degree in physics. However,
That’s important, because Moore’s famous Law, according to which the power of computers doubles every two years, is on its way to hitting the very limits of nature. Transistors, where the currents that in computing are translated as 1 and 0 or bits are housed, can measure as little as 10 nanometers (ten billionths of a meter). The atoms are just under 1 nanometer long. We need a strategy other than miniaturization if we want to continue to increase the power of computers.
Tanisha Bassan, an expert at the Bankinter Innovation Foundation and developer of quantum computing at the Harvard-founded startup Zapata Computing, gave a very graphic example this year during the Future Trends Forum dedicated to Artificial Intelligence to explain the properties of quantum computing. “Imagine a library with millions and millions of books. If I mark the page of one of them with an X and ask a supercomputer to find it, it will take a very long time because it will have to go through all the pages of all the books, one by one. A quantum computer, on the other hand, would be able to review all those books at once,” he explained.
Applications of quantum computing
Why can we want a quantum computer? To solve very complex problems. As the size of numbers and databases increases, the performance of conventional computers falls. And that, big data, is the world we live in today. Quantum computing could make searches in large, unindexed databases very quickly resolved. One of the limits of machine learning’s progression is often the amount of time needed to train algorithms: quantum computing could revolutionize this task. Complex cryptography, such as that used in blockchain, could also experience a new era when these new computers are put into operation.
Calculate vehicle routes in real time taking into account other traffic, research new materials, develop complex simulations… The potential applications of quantum computing are as broad as the expectations placed on it. Will they be deserved?
