What is Quantum Computing and Why It’s Important
The decade of the 1990s makes technology reachable to everyone in the shape of computers, the internet, and cell phones. These sorts of technologies started to change people’s lives in ways that are familiar to us today. Computer components are becoming smaller in size each day.
Getting Started:
A traditional computer CPU (Central Processing Unit) is built of simple arithmetic and logical units. The tiniest component of a computer system is a transistor that works as an electric switch. It provides the current a passage to pass in the formation of electrons. It represents the state of a switch (ON/Off) or (0/1). The transistor combined form logical gates like AND, OR, and NOT which can manipulate these bits and give outputs like addition, subtraction, multiplication, and many more complex operations.
Why Quantum Computing:
IBM claims to have developed the world’s smallest working silicon transistor. At 6 nanometers in length (a nanometer, nm, is one-billionth of a meter), the new transistor is at least 10 times smaller than state-of-the-art transistors in production now, the company said in a statement today. This claimed transistor is sixteen times less than the HIV (Human Immunodeficiency Virus) diameter and 1000 times smaller than the red blood cell. The transistors are shrinking to the size of few atoms, which may raise a problem for electrons to pass thoroughly. We are reaching a physical barrier for our technological progress. In the quantum realm, physics works differently, and traditional computers stop making sense.
How it begins
In 1998 Isaac Chuang of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, Neil Gershenfeld of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and Mark Kubinec from the University of California at Berkeley created the first quantum computer (2-qubit) that could be loaded with data and output a solution. In quantum computing, the basic computational unit is a Qubit to show the output. A qubit is somehow similar to a classical bit with a probability of being one or zero but concurrently, a combination of both zero and one. A qubit can be any two level quantum system.
What is Quantum Computing?
According to Wikipedia, Quantum computing is the exploitation of collective properties of quantum states, such as superposition and entanglement, to perform computation. The devices that perform quantum computations are known as quantum computers. Quantum entanglement is the state where two systems are so strongly interconnected with each other that gaining information about one system will transfer information about the other no matter how far these systems are like telepathy. Superposition states that qubits can hold both 0 and 1 states at the same time.
Tradition vs Quantum Mechanism
In a traditional logical gate, simple inputs are used and produced one definite result. Quantum gates take inputs in superposition, rotate probabilities, and provide another superposition. Quantum computers use multiple qubits and use quantum gates to entangle them and manipulate them. It calculates all outcomes at the same time. It is quicker in computation than our traditional computers and used for solving complex problems which take days, weeks, or even months for a simple computer to compute by using quantum mechanics. Quantum computers work on the proposed Quantum Theory that unveils the nature and behavior of energy and matter on the quantum (atomic and sub-atomic) scale. Although quantum computers may not replace our traditional computer but they are far superior in multiple cases.
Application of Quantum Computers:
There is a large number of problems in real world that blow up exponentially. An IBM researcher Dario Gil states:
“The dirty secret in the world of computing we always talk about those things that a computer can solve, but there are lot of things that computer cannot solve, and very interestingly they cannot solve it now not ever.”
Simulations of the quantum chemistry and physics can be very resourceful, that can help simulate complex molecular structure that can revolutionize the medical sector.
Searching in huge databases can take a lot of time. Traditional system may have to search all the entries to get the expected result. While searching in normal system can take X time, quantum computer can perform same operation in Square root of (X) time.
Data Encryption is used to secure your data so intruders cannot access your data. Public and private keys are used for encryption of that data. Every encoded data has a public key that can only be decoded with your private key. Although your private key can be extracted from your public key but it would take years for normal computer to decode it. Quantum computer can decode these in a blink of eye.
Future of Quantum Computing:
In 2019, Google announced that it had achieved quantum supremacy with its 54-qubit Sycamore processor that could perform calculations in 200 seconds. It took the most powerful supercomputer in the world 10,000 years to complete this task.
In July 2021, China defeated Google and searched for the most powerful quantum computer in the world. Jian-Wei Pan from the University of Science and Technology in China in Hefei and his colleagues say that their quantum computer solved the problem in just over an hour, which would take the world’s most powerful classic supercomputer eight years to break, and maybe still was capable of exponentially higher performance.
University of Science and Technology of China/quantumcomputer.ac.cn
Quantum computing is on the rise, and innovations are coming to knowledge every day. Maybe in the future, we may be able to get the answer to Unanswerable questions. Might be, we will be able to entangle robots just like Jaegers from the Pacific rim to our minds and control them. We have to wait a bit more for that to happen.
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if you are interested more you might find these articles useful:
Quantum Computing Statistics: Forecasts & Facts [2021]
Future of Quantum Computing in 2021: in-Depth Guide
References:
· https://research.aimultiple.com/quantum-computing-entanglement/
· https://research.aimultiple.com/quantum-computing-applications/
· https://www.computerworld.com/article/2579779/ibm-claims-world-s-smallest-silicon-transistor.html
· https://research.aimultiple.com/future-of-quantum-computing/
