The allies of Quantum Computing

For many of us coming from a Computer Science background, Quantum Computing is a fascinating field because it marries science and engineering, allowing us to put to work concepts hitherto restricted to the theoretical realms of Academia. For Physicists, Mathematicians and all brews of researchers, the availability of these tangible NISQ devices opens up a new world of fast iteration on their investigation, allowing them to validate theoretical concepts and iterate quickly on them. We have never lived in a time where breakthroughs in quantum science were done in nearly weekly basis.

As more people from different backgrounds jump aboard it is difficult at times to differentiate the signal from the noise. This year I’ve seen contributions from classical developers and architects that, on their eagerness to share with the world what for them is a new toy to play, tended to oversimplify ideas or plainly made invalid comparisons between quantum and classic computing, presenting quantum physics concepts with pretended familiarity. While I appreciate the sentiment, we should be careful when applying the "best way to learn something is to teach it to someone else" rule too literally.

However I still think we should be as inclusive as we possibly can: we are all here to add value with our backgrounds and should cooperate and learn from each other. The vast majority of the researchers and professors that I had interactions with are as eager to learn from computer scientists as they are to deepen their theoretical knowledge and get their work published. That’s so inspiring to see in the polarized world we live in nowadays. I got answers to my ground-level questions by people in my network whose research work is so impressive that I wouldn’t imagine they’d bother debating with me... but I also helped researchers to clarify concepts that for me as a cloud architect were just bread and butter, assuming everyone would know. What a rewarding feeling to help people you respect and admire. 

All four pillars: Quantum Mechanics fundamentals, algorithm development & circuit implementation, hardware design engineering, and control systems & integration are equally important to the development of this field. On top of that, we need to equip people who can speak the business development and solutions architecture languages, so they can go and evangelize companies bridging on the terms they are familiar with: cloud computing, security, and DevOps as they integrate with Quantum Computing.