Computers have become the most inevitable part of human life. Everyday life, operations, and work are too much dependent on computer technology. The history of computer technology is almost a century old. This technology has experienced way much fast innovation from the large rooms of bulky machines and vacuum tubes to handheld devices in a few decades. Now, in the 21st century, companies are competing to achieve quantum supremacy. Here, you may have a question. What is quantum computing or quantum computer?
The answer to your question is that quantum computers are based on the concepts of quantum physics. In which, the methodology of super-positioning allows the subatomic particles to be in different states at the same time and encodes probability distribution. In simple words, it’s like spinning a coin. The output will be either heads or tails but, in this case, until the moment you stop the coin after flipping it, it can be either. Super-positioning is just like this. Quantum computing means that use quantum-mechanical concepts as superposition to perform the computational operations with the computer. The traditional computer works on the system of binary it like 0 & 1 and gives solutions accordingly but on the other side, Quantum Computer works on the qubits which allow the computer to achieve the ultimate power by existing in both 0 & 1 at the same time. This makes Quantum computer too much power to solve the operation in a few seconds which might take years to get solved. These computers are way more efficient than regular computers and consume less energy to operate.
Google’s Quantum Computer (Sycamore Processor)
Tech giants in the worlds like Google, IBM, Intel, Lockheed Martin, and many others are working to achieve this quantum computing power and few of them also became successful. On Oct 23, 2019, Google announced that they have achieved the quantum computing supremacy and perform the complex computational task in just 200 seconds which may take 10,000 years to be solved on the traditional computer. This quantum computer developed by Google is millions of times more efficient than the traditional computing capacity with current state-of-the-art algorithms.
“ It is likely that the classical simulation time, currently estimated at 10,000 years, will be reduced by improved classical hardware and algorithms, but, since we are currently 1.5 trillion times faster, we feel comfortable laying claim to this achievement ” – said Brooks Foxen (researcher in Google scientist John Martinis’ group)
Sycamore is basically a fully programmable processor with 54 qubits installed on the two-dimensional grid. The grid is designed in such a way that it provides maximum connectivity to the qubit throughout the processor.
This processor is designed in such a way that each qubit is connected with 4 other qubits on the grid to provide the ultimate efficiency to the computer. Qubit is actually the quantum bits that help the computer to achieve the concept of super-positioning.
Applications of this quantum computer
The companies are investing too much money in research and manufacturing these quantum computers, but why? What are the outputs and results we can and want to achieve from these ultimate machines?
The companies are not investing this much money, just to get more computing power, there is a lot more than this. There are many theories of Artificial Intelligence (AI), which can not be proved because we didn’t have as powerful computers as needed to implement those theories. Google is interested to implement the near-term applications and computations on it. There are many simulations and need to be solved related to machine learning, artificial intelligence, chemistry, and quantum physics. This computer could be helpful to design more efficient and safer chemical reactions that possibly have the power to revolutionize the industry.
Cryptography is one of the major interests of many companies. Right now, computer security (encryption technology) is one of the major risks to the IT world. The traditional encryption depends on the factoring concept (converting large numbers into the prime numbers) which is very costly and impossible for the normal computers. But for the Quantum computer, it too much easy to do. So, we will have better encryption with the quantum computer which may be impossible to break due to its uncertainty.
Read More: The Rise and Rise of Quantum Computing
Quantum supremacy
There are many tech giants and countries participating in this race and trying to achieve supremacy as sooner than others. Like the United States planned to invest more than 10 billion dollars in this sector, many others are doing so. The reason why the countries and companies want to achieve this supremacy is that this technology is way much revolutionizing. They can use it to get perfection to solve a real-world complex problem which was never possible before. This technology can be used to find new materials for faster development of the drugs, more perfect planning and routing, for securing themselves by ultimate encrypting power and much more. At this stage, we don’t even know how much benefits we can get through this technology but we eagerly want it to know and make it more valuable as it is now.
What’s next with Quantum computing?
The company seems interested to find out the most valuable finding to use the quantum computer and its capabilities. Google announced that the company believes that the researchers are always the reason for innovations and advancement in any field, so Google might present this technology to use by the academic researchers, to scientists for the research purpose to invent something new, something more useful with the help of quantum computing. Moreover, the company wants it to be more accurate and computationally fault-tolerant and revolutionize daily life with its power. It can help mankind from deigning better chemical reactions to seeing more far into space, from performing complex mathematical and physics calculations to providing better and more effective medicines for the medical industry. So, in short, as this technology will be more and more practical, it will start changing every aspect of life and push it to the perfection
About the Author
nice