Quantum Computing — the Next Big Thing?

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4 min readFeb 27, 2023

Over the past several years, I have liked to read about the advances that the Quantum Computing industry has been making. A few years ago, I even went to a Quantum Computing meetup in London. I will caveat this blog post by saying that I am not an expert, by any means, in this field. It is just something that I enjoy reading and hearing about.

So what is a Quantum Computer anyway?

Like classical silicon computers, there are many different types with different architectures. This ranges from the Quantum Annealer type (which technically isn’t a true Quantum Computer) such as the ones developed by D-Wave Systems, to ones which are based on gate model computing such as the IBM Osprey. But the simple point is all these computers at their most basic level use qubits rather than bits to perform their logic and calculations.

But what is a qubit?

A quantum bit.

…?

OK, OK. Basically, I have heard two different explanations about what a qubit is. The first is that a qubit can be a 1 or 0 at the same time. This enables it to theoretically solve problems much more quickly than a classical computer can.

The second way I have heard this described is that a qubit can represent any value between 0 and 1 which results in the same as the above. This is represented by the “simple” diagram below:

This is great and all but what could quantum computers be used for?

They can be used for many useful applications. The first thing that people have heard or tend to think about is the ability for quantum computers to break through the encryption that is used throughout the internet. This is partially true as some encryption algorithms are vulnerable to this, but there are ones that are already believed to be resistant to a brute force attempt by a quantum computer, such as AES-256.

Other examples that Quantum Computing could be used in are things such as artificial intelligence, traffic management, and delivering management.

What are they used for right now though?

At present quantum computers are still in their infancy, although certainly a lot further on from where they were when I first started reading about this topic. Despite this, it is still rather difficult to find what quantum computers (or quantum computer simulators at least) are actually currently used for. For the most part they are still being used to number crunch very complicated mathematical problems, which have limited real world use, but will eventually prove that an existing quantum computer can solve a problem a classical computer cannot. As a result of this there hasn’t been any application of quantum computing which could not be solved by using classical supercomputers. It is important to note that the quantum annealing method used by D-Wave is currently being used by dozens of commercial clients, but these problems tend to only be optimisation problems. However, below are some current applications that I came across when writing this blog:

· IBM and Boeing are working on designing corrosion resistant materials using a mixture of classical and quantum computing

· E-ON has been using D-Wave Quantum Computers (although as mentioned above there is a debate on the correct term here) to help optimise a renewable energy grid

· NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory is using Azure Quantum to look at ways to communicate more efficiently exploring space

All this stuff seems interesting. How do I learn more about it?

I typically enjoyed reading news articles to start with. After that, many companies have lots of resources that you can use to learn more about quantum computing. You can use AWS Bracket or Azure Quantum or even some of the resources D-Wave Systems has made available. Personally, I have played around with AWS Bracket and the Quantum Development Kit from Microsoft, the latter of which uses emulation and a programming language called Q#. There are several resources available which introduce quantum computing in an accessible way.

Is it worth learning about quantum computers?

Well, this is a topic I have been interested in for years now, so of course I would say yes. In a nutshell, if you want to learn more about the topic then yes. However, if you are wanting to learn it because you think it will take over the world then perhaps not. Quantum computing will likely be a very useful niche in computing, but I don’t think they will ever truly replace traditional computers and it will probably be 5+ years before quantum computers are regularly solving real world problems at scale. However, the above is just my opinion. Did I get anything wrong? Are you from the future and quantum computers have taken over/never took off? Feel free to comment below.