Quantum computing, are you joking?
There are times when you have a clear memory of when you were curious about something. My first piece of quantum mechanics comes from discovering in the teenage years the funny autobiography of Richard Feynman, Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!. It is wonderful to see what progress has been made in this field, and its potential practical applications.
Last week I had the opportunity to listen to Ignacio Cirac on the state of the art of quantum computing. It is exceptional to hear firsthand a top level physicist working in this field. Once again, it is hard to believe the fast pace we are experiencing. Quantum mechanics is a discipline with only 100 years of life, and the first idea of applying quantum laws to computing is from the early 1980s. Today we are very close to having the first quantum computers. But it also happens that. when it is even the front page of Time, research is involved in a career that makes it difficult to know the actual state of progress.
Quantum Supremacy will be achieved in 2 or 3 years and within 10 years we have the first quantum supercomputers
When in conventional computing we work with bits, these can be 1 or 0. Simple. In quantum computing, we work with qubits. Its main feature is that they can have the value 0 and 1 at a time, in what is called a coherent superposition. Both. Although it is simple is what it costs more to understand. In addition, the different qubits are entangled. These characteristics allow it to perform parallel operations, exponentially, solving tasks that are costly in conventional computing. It seems that quantum computation may be the next technological leap that allows continuing with the exponential curve in computing capacity. Something that Gordon Moore stated in his Moore’s Law, but which has been present since the invention of the first valve computers.
We know that conventional computing is very good for multiplying, but instead, has problems factorizing. Cryptography relies on this difficulty in designing its encryption methods. If you want to decipher an asymmetric key system you need to factorize, and the required computing power is exponentially more expensive the longer the key. To date, there is still no quantum computer capable of overcoming these algorithms, but it is already known that it will be possible. This is why a line of work called post-quantum cryptography appears that designs algorithms in the hope that quantum computation will not be able to break them.
Cryptography is a fundamental area of application of quantum computation, but where I think it can have a spectacular development is in its application to Artificial Intelligence. The opportunity arises for new Machine Learning quantum algorithms to appear, which, together with a much larger computing capacity, will allow Artificial Intelligence to make a jump difficult to imagine.
In the current state of the art, it is very remarkable the work of D-Wave coming to develop and sell some quantum computer. Although there are still more conventional computers using principles of quantum mechanics, are presenting a breakthrough. At the research level, they are also making big investments in this field Google, Microsoft, IBM and Intel.
The advance is such that Ignacio Cirac commented that a few years ago did not expect to live to see these quantum computers, but now he hopes that quantum supremacy will be achieved in 2 or 3 years and within 10 years we have the first quantum supercomputers. There are experts who even hope to be able to leave the laboratory in 2017, crossing a turning point that allows jumping from research to engineering.
(en español aquí)
