Basics of... Quantum Computers

This edition of #BasicsOf will try to "simply" explain what Quantum Computers/Computing is and is part of the complete "Basics of..." Serie you can find here.

"Quantum Computers" sounds like just invented in "Star Wars". But as incredible as it sounds: they exist. And they work. And they are efficient. And are likely to become very relevant in the future.

Basically, Quantum Computers (QC) can perform the same tasks as "usual" computers. Just "a bit" faster.... A team at Google has recently built a QC and gave it a task the "usual" Google Server farm would have needed 114 millions (!) years to calculate. It took 10 minutes to that Quantum Computer.

A Quantum Computer is not that big... it would fit into 1-2 shower cabins. But obviously it needs specific technology and cooling (sometimes as low as -273 degree Celsius, close to 0 degree Kelvin) and this is why it is unlikely to become "widespread" soon. But there are already "Quantum Computing as a Service" offerings available.

Inside a Quantum Computer:

So what is the difference to "Supercomputers" then? Well, Supercomputers don't have the working memory to hold the myriad combinations of real world problems and Supercomputers have to analyze each combination one after another, which can take a long time. QC can do that in "parallel".

Explaining how Quantum Computers actually work is more complex... at first they do not use "electricity" to define if a "bit" is set to 0 or 1 but they use the status of sub-atomic particles like photons. Also, the unit used is not called "bits" but "qubits". And the fact you can kind of combine "multi-dimensional" 1 and 0 qubits lead to these fabulous computational performances.

Or another good explanation from “Inside the weird world of quantum computers”: https://www.wired.co.uk/article/quantum-computing-explained

Quantum computing differs from traditional binary computing in that takes advantage of the strange ability of subatomic particles to exist in more than one state at any time (it’s like your children, where you can both love and dislike them at the same time). In classical digital computing, a bit is a single piece of information that can exist in two states – 1 or 0. Quantum computing uses quantum bits, or ‘qubits’ instead. A qubit can be thought of like an imaginary sphere, where a qubit can be any point on the sphere

And to close this list, a great paper describing computing history and some outlook thoughts: https://education.dellemc.com/content/dam/dell-emc/documents/en-us/2021KS_Radwan-Quantum_Computing_as_a_Savior_QCaaS.pdf

Looking forward to see how these will evolve in the coming years. Fascinating technology in my view.

This article is part of the complete "Basics of..." Serie which you can find here: https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/basics-overview-patrick-roettger/

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