20. QUANTUM COMPUTERS ARE THE NEW SUPERCOMPUTER

Complex data, like weather patterns or climate changes, will be crunched though in the fraction of the time

Dreams of exploiting the bizarre realm of quantum mechanics to create super-powerful computers have been around since the 1980s. But in 2019 something happened that made lots of people sit up and take quantum computers seriously. Google’s quantum computer, Sycamore, solved a problem that would take conventional computers much, much longer. In doing so, Sycamore had achieved ‘quantum supremacy’ for the first time – doing something beyond conventional capabilities.

The task Sycamore completed, verifying that a set of numbers were randomly distributed, took it 200 seconds. Google claims it would have taken IBM’s Summit, the most powerful conventional supercomputer, 10,000 years. IBM begs to differ, saying it would only take Summit 2.5 days.

Regardless, this landmark event has given the quantum computer research community a shot in the arm. A blog post by Sycamore’s developers (bit.ly/quantum_

supremacy) gives a sense of this. “We see a path clearly now, and we’re eager to move ahead.”

But don’t expect to be using a quantum computer at home. It’s more likely to be running simulations in chemistry and physics, performing complex tasks such as modelling interactions between molecules and in doing so, speeding up the development of new drugs, catalysts and materials. In the longer term, quantum computers promise rapid advances in everything from weather forecasting to AI.