WHAT IS QUANTUM COMPUTING?
this information predict how it will react to future events. First, Biercuk’s team made a qubit by trapping a single ion of ytterbium in a beam of laser light. To train their algorithm, they simulated noise, tweaking the light to disturb the atom in a co
REGULAR COMPUTERS operate according to strict rules of logic. But tiny quantum objects – such as electrons, or photons of light – can break those rules.
Quantum computing is the idea that we can use this quantum rule-breaking to process information in a new way—one that’s totally different from how regular computers work. This makes them, in some cases, exponentially faster than any regular computer.
For example, one quantum computer could easily crack the codes that keep internet banking secure.
SO, LIKE A SUPERCOMPUTER? —
Not exactly. A quantum computer is not just a “faster” computer. There are a few specific tasks – such as factoring very large numbers – which a quantum computer would be amazing at. (This is where the codebreaking comes in – see below.) But for most jobs, a quantum computer would be little better than a regular computer.
SO WHAT COULD A QUANTUM COMPUTER BE USED FOR? —
They will probably be most useful for government agencies, research and development companies and universities in solving problems that current computers struggle with.
The first practical idea, proposed by the physicist Richard Feynman in 1981, was to use a quantum computer to simulate quantum mechanics. This would impact chemistry and biology. Chemists, for example, could accurately model drug interactions and biologists could study all the possible ways proteins can fold and interact with one another.
While quantum computers were once an academic curiosity, interest exploded in 1994 when the American mathematician Peter Shor found a way to use quantum computers to break codes.
Currently, many online security systems run on the principle that it’s next to impossible to take a very large number and figure out what its prime factors are. All a regular computer can do is try every possibility one after another – a task that could take billions of years. Using Shor’s algorithm, a quantum computer could perform the task in a few hours.
Quantum computers could also be fantastic at recognising patterns in data – useful for machine learning problems, such as being able to identify different objects in an image. They could be great at building