Quote of the day by IBM’s Darío Gil: “Not even a million or a billion of those supercomputers connected together could do the calculations of these future machines”
Although AI has sucked up all the bandwidth of public discourse across the tech industry, quantum computing is arguably just as revolutionary a technology – but remains dormant for now. That said, key breakthroughs in the last couple of years are said to mean that these machines could be ‘useful’ before too long.
Quantum advantage
IBM’s senior vice president and director of research Dario Gil explained to CBS’ 60 Minutes exactly what the likely impact of useful quantum computers would be.
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The idea of quantum advantage, he said, was slightly difficult to wrap your head around. That’s certain given the ratcheting-up effect in terms of power that happens when you begin to scale up these machines from just a handful of quantum bits (qubits) to thousands, tens of thousands and beyond.
Because the capabilities of quantum computers grow exponentially the more qubits that you add to the system, it could one day achieve things we haven’t been able to even conceptualise yet due to the rigid parameters of existing computing.
More problems
Quantum computing does represent a paradigm shift, as Gil was trying to convey, but that doesn’t mean simply building powerful hardware will help us achieve anything. Scientists are also aware that we need to define problems to solve using these future machines.
Many companies like IBM and others have been granting businesses access to quantum computers through the cloud, but these have primarily been used for early pilot programs, to build proprietary algorithms or gear their systems for future hardware.
For example, both Mercedes-Benz and Volkswagen have partnered with the IBM Quantum Network to simulate chemical reactions inside EV battery cells.
