When business journals start trying to explain some complicated technology in simple terms, its usually a sure sign of a technology entering the mainstream. Quantum computing is no exception. The biggest difference, however, is that predictions regarding quantum computing’s impact range significantly. For data science consultants, quantum computing might be the biggest technological breakthrough of the century, while professionals from neighboring fields might label it as a technology that will never become practical in the business context.
First things first, it’s critical to understand what this technology is all about, and where does the hype comes from. Nowadays, digital computers are the brains and hearts of seemingly anything that needs processing power. From a dishwasher to a satellite, somewhere under the hood, the embedded computers perform thousands of calculations to ensure that these objects function as intended.
These conventional computers store information in binary bits, which can be either one or zero. The logic here is pretty straightforward: the more complicated the process is, the more power and time it takes for the computer to perform the calculations.
Such an approach to problem-solving has limitations when it comes to a particular set of tasks. For example, if a digital computer is tasked with finding a certain combination of 8 digits, it will have to sequentially go through each of the 100,000,000 combinations, which will take an inordinate amount of time to complete. While this is quite a simplified example, this type of task, which is known as combinatorics, is essential to problem-solving in many fields including logistics, finance, chemistry, cybersecurity, and manufacturing.
In this sense, quantum computing provides a much faster and more optimized way of problem-solving and data-driven decision-making that involve combinatorics. Unlike digital computers which store and transfer data in binary bits, quantum computing relies on non-binary qubits, which can store many potential values at once. This concept is known as superposition. Most mainstream media oversimplify this term, implying that a qubit can be 1 and 0 at the same time.
While it’s much more complicated than that, it’s close to impossible to explain superposition without solid computer science and particle physics backgrounds. For us laypeople, what really matters is that quantum computing significantly speeds up the calculations that involve combinatorics. For example, IBM claims that if you need to find one specific item in a list of one trillion items, the digital computer would require one week to find it, while the quantum computer would need one second.
Commercial applications of quantum computing
Cybersecurity
Combinatorics is among the first associations when it comes to cybersecurity. In essence, if wrongdoers ever get access to quantum computers, today’s cybersecurity practices will become irrelevant. While it’s very uncertain when quantum computers will become publicly available, there are already a group of companies that develop quantum-safe solutions.
Chemistry
Drug development has combinatorics at its core. There are so many possible combinations of atoms that, conventionally, drug discovery requires a lot of luck. Moreover, as molecules get continuously more complex, the possible configurations grow exponentially. Quantum computers will play an increasingly important role in drug development and the discovery of new molecules.
Finance
In general, success in the financial industry is greatly dependent on prediction accuracy. For example, to determine the least risky and most profitable opportunities, stock market professionals simulate market movements utilizing computers. This is why advantage is often correlated to computing speeds. Consequentially, with the coming of quantum computers, the world of stock markets will change forever.
Decoherence
Despite the unprecedented potential that quantum computers have, there is a range of technical challenges for applying this technology at scale. Currently, the output of quantum computers is rather unreliable, a problem known as decoherence. When qubits interact with the environment, their quantum states can be changed, meaning that data stored by a quantum computer can be lost. Nearby magnetic and electric fields, warm objects, and almost any other source of environmental noise can cause decoherence.
Fortunately, there is no shortage of proposed solutions to this problem. The absolute majority of these solutions are based on quantum error correction, some type of algorithm that can identify and fix errors in qubits. Currently, though, there is no feasible quantum error correction method that can be used at scale. However, given that the industry’s giants like Google and IBM are pouring millions of dollars to make quantum computing commercially available, it’s almost certain that a functional error-reduction method is somewhere on the horizon.
Quantum computing’s ability to solve enormous combinatorics problems in the blink of an eye will inevitably revolutionize many industries. While there is still no reliable prediction for when commercially available quantum computers will get released, their huge potential suggests that the world’s biggest companies won’t stop innovating anytime soon.
