Impact Zone

Speculations on Quantum Computing’s effect on our world

Quantum computing began as a theoretical hacky sack for physicist-mathematicians.

Generations of tentative implementations turned quantum computing into the ultimate electronics toy. By 2020, quantum computing has progressed to the point where the popular question, “Is that a thing?” can be answered in the affirmative.

As engineering advances, it may be time to ask how digital binary computers (your laptop .. workstation .. tablet .. phone .. refrigerator) have affected our world and what that suggests about a future with quantum computing.

Generations ago, recorded sound was sub-divisible to the elastic limits of the molecular medium (e.g., vinyl) or magnetic medium onto which it was transcribed. Modern digital sound is instead broken up into samplings, tiny stair-steps instead of a fractal curve. Many perceive the difference in audio texture between these two recording methods, leading to a resurgence in popularity of vinyl.

Likewise, the decomposition of visual images into rectangular pixels has replaced the “warmer” texture of photographic film.

These technological changes have altered our perception, made it more abstract, detached it somewhat from a natural grasp, made us more forgiving of lost detail, lost information. On the rebound, improvement in the video technology which may have originally stunted our perception has taken us from “Space Invaders” pixelisation to 4K video and beyond.

Aspects of quantum computing may cause us to experience another perceptual shift.

The time-consuming trigonometry which digital binary computing uses to render the world to us is inherent in qubits, which are trigonometric, not binary. Qubits map more closely to the fundamentals of material existence than do binary bits. This seems likely to lead to surprises in modelling our world.

Current showcase algorithms in the emerging field struggle to express simple scenarios. They factor problems into tiny gulps which suit small, noise-ridden, intermediate-stage devices. What novel approaches will emerge when QPUs are capacious and ensconced in a complete hardware infrastructure (QRAM, QBUS, etc.)?

In 1950, at the very dawn of digital binary computing, scientist and science fiction author Isaac Asimov “invented” intelligent robots. Asimov was fascinated with two technological developments of his time, the discovery of the positron (1937) and the experiments in electronic analog computing at the University of Chicago and elsewhere which preceded digital binary computing.

Asimov hypothesized a robotic brain consisting of a platinum-iridium sponge with engineered pathways along which positrons are created and destroyed.

Well.

Over half a century after Asimov’s “invention”, a paper described the principles of topological quantum computing, at the time a conjectural but highly attractive alternate approach to transmon-based, photon-based, or ion-trap quantum computing. Here is a quote from that paper:

The process of creating a particle-antiparticle pair, moving one of the particles around the torus, and annihilating it specifies a unitary operator on the ground state.” — Topological Quantum Computation, Freedman/Kitaev/Larsen/Wang, 2008

The only certainty is that the world which we are entering is a world of wonder.