What is Quantum Computing?

Computing systems are primarily created to store and manipulate information. The classical computers we’re used to, manipulate individual bits which store information in the form of binary ‘0’ and ‘1’.

Quantum computers use quantum mechanical phenomena to manipulate information in form of “Quantum bits” or “Qubits”.

REAL WORLD APPLICATIONS

IBM Q has undertaken the first industry initiative to build universal quantum computers for finance, engineering and science. Part of this initiative involves advancing the quantum computing technology stack and exploring applications to make it universally usable and accessible.

Currently, several IBM quantum devices are available to the public through their quantum cloud services. Users can access simulators and quantum devices for free through IBM Q Experience or Qiskit.

Some of the major real world application of this technology are as follows:

Traffic optimization by Volkswagen:

• Traffic optimization is the methods by which time stopped in road traffic is reduced.

• Volkswagen and D-Wave announced a collaboration to find a solution to traffic optimization using quantum computing.

• After working together for three months to figure out how to map the data to quantum machinery, the team was able to generate solutions in seconds.

• When attempted on regular (a.k.a. classical computing system) Volkswagen server, the same solution took up to half an hour to be generated.

• The Volkswagen software engineers were even able to use D-Wave quantum machinery through the cloud instead of on-premise hardware.

• Volkswagen has continued its quantum investments since the project and announced a partnership with Google for further development in traffic optimization using quantum computing.

Election modelling

• Henderson, a senior data scientist at QxBranch, an engineering and analytics company specializing in quantum computing applications, applied quantum computing trained models to simulate election results.

• Using historical election results, state result probabilities based off of polling and publicly available data from statistical analysis site FiveThiryEight, Henderson and his colleagues mapped the election to a Boltzman machine(neural network), which was then mapped to a quantum system.

• Each iteration of the training model produced 25,000 solutions which demonstrated greater uncertainty and less certainty of a Clinton win, and pinpointed most of the “tipping-point” states, which the classical systems failed to generate.

Marketing and advertisement

• Recruit, a Japan-based marketing and communications corporation, has begun quantum computing for marketing and advertising applications.

• Recruit used quantum technology to place advertisements on mobile platforms and found it to be more effective than the previously used machine learning algorithms.

• Recruit is currently trying to improve upon machine learning methods through quantum computing, to improve recommendation systems.

Denso and Toyota

• In December, DENSO Corporation and Toyota partnered to apply quantum computing to factory and traffic optimization as well as autonomous driving.

• The companies used cloud-based quantum systems to analyze the information and improve efficiency, which included working on traffic decongestion and emergency vehicle route optimization.

• At the Consumer Electronics Show, DENSO showed that quantum technology allowed the companies to immediately carry out calculations on a larger system of data and calculate optimal routes for more vehicles in real time

• Traditional systems could only manage individual optimization.

Cryptography & IT security

• IT security primarily depends upon encryption and public key cryptography, which are based on complex, difficult to cipher mathematical algorithms.

• Even by using enormous amounts of computing power, modern algorithms with suitable key length, such as AES-128, RSA-2048, ECDSA-256, would take up centuries or even time longer than lifetime of the universe, to break

• However, using quantum computing, unique algorithms can be generated, like Shor’s algorithm, that can break encryptions in a significantly shorter time span.

• While symmetric algorithms such as AES-256 will be harder to break, unsymmetric algorithms such as RSA and ECDSA will be rendered useless.

Schrodinger’s equation

• Researchers from Osaka City University (OCU) in Japan have discovered a quantum algorithm that would enable users to perform full configuration interaction ( Full Cl) calculations suitable for chemical reactions exponential/combinatorial explosion.

• This gives the exact numerical solutions of Schrodinger’s Equation, which are intractable problems for the current supercomputers.

• Such a quantum algorithm contributes to the acceleration of implementing practical quantum computers.

• A paper on Full Cl approach implemented on quantum computers have been published in ACS Central Science.

Advantage of quantum computing over classical computing

Subatomic particles have a unique property of being able to exist in two different states simultaneously.

Quantum computing exploits this property to carry out operations much faster and utilizing much less energy than classical computing systems.

In classical computing systems, bit is a single piece of information that can exist in two states – ‘1’ or ‘0’.

However, in quantum computing system, a single qubit can store more information than just ‘1’ or ‘0’ because they can exist in any superposition of these values.

“The difference between classical bits and qubits is that we can also prepare qubits in a quantum superposition of 0 and 1 and create nontrivial correlated states of a number of qubits, so-called ‘entangled states’ “
-stated by Alexey Fedorov, physicist at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology.

Future of quantum computing

The basic principle of quantum computation is that the quantum properties can be used to represent and structure data, and that quantum mechanisms can be devised and built to perform operations with this data.
While small scale quantum computers have been developed, we are still years behind building a large scale quantum computer.

Google, IBM and D-Wave Systems are currently working on different approaches to build this new generation of super computers

If large-scale quantum computers can be built, they will be able to solve certain problems exponentially faster than any of the current classical computers.

Research in both theoretical and practical areas continues at a frantic pace, and many national government and military funding agencies support quantum computing research to develop quantum computers for both civilian and national security purposes.