Waterloo startup partners with Google and IBM on quantum tool kit
Cutting edge tech has medical potential
TORONTO • When Google published an obscure blog post last week announcing a new tool kit called Cirq for programming quantum computers, the post included a nod to a Canadian company doing leading-edge work in the area.
Quantum Benchmark, based in Kitchener-Waterloo, Ont., is developing software tools that mitigate the glitches that are an essential fact of life with quantum computing, and their True-Q technology is integrated into Google’s Cirq program.
The nod from Google came just months after Quantum Benchmark announced a partnership with IBM to work on its quantum computing program.
Quantum computing is one of the most exciting technologies for bleedingedge futurists, and proponents talk in superlatives about how it’s going to change the world.
“The technology is getting very close to prime time,” said Joseph Emerson, CEO of Quantum Benchmark and an associate professor at the University of Waterloo’s Institute for Quantum Computing.
“We’re really just, I would say, six months out from having quantum computers that will outperform classical computers in some capacity.”
Using various methods, researchers can isolate individual atomic structures and manipulate them in order to perform computational functions.
Most of these computers involve cooling the quantum computing chips down to a fraction of a degree above absolute zero, or working in a vacuum that’s emptier than deep space.
Most articles about quantum computing say that conventional computers rely on data being encoded as a one or a zero, but because of a phenomenon called superposition, quantum bits — called “qubits” — can be both a one and a zero at the same time.
Emerson said that the real magic of quantum computing is in creating multiple qubits that interact with each other in a state of quantum “coherence.”
So then what is coherence? “Coherence is the magic that we can describe mathematically, but beyond that nobody knows what it is,” Emerson explained.
Even though experts understand the theory and mathematics behind quantum phenomena well enough to create working computers, Emerson said explaining how the computers work in plain language is essentially impossible, because the quantum world is so radically different from the physical world as humans experience it.
Emerson said the technology is still roughly akin to where conventional computing was in the 1950s, and current prototypes are gigantic, expensive and finicky.
Theoretically, though, quantum computers are very good at doing certain tasks.
The most tantalizing opportunity is when it comes to simulating atomic structures to predict the likely properties of new chemical compounds.
This would prove to be enormously useful for materials science and especially medical research, where drug discovery currently involves a laborious process to figure out which potential compounds are likely to have a useful medicinal effect.
To get closer to that reality, Quantum Benchmark is trying to address one of the big problems associated with current quantum computers: the tendency toward inserting errors into computations.
Because quantum computers rely on manipulating atoms literally on the quantum level, absolutely any imperfection in the environment can cause errors in the calculation.
In the near future, quantum computers are expected to get powerful enough that their calculations cannot be double-checked by conventional computers. Figuring out software tools to minimize errors and validate quantum computations is essential if they’re ever to transition from a curiosity in an academic lab to a useful tool in the commercial world.
“We’re seeing an interesting transition from academic openness to people being a little more careful and trying to capture (intellectual property) now,” Emerson said.