Over the past month, we have been bombarded with news about how Quantum Computing is here and how it will change the world and our lives. It followed Google’s announcement that its quantum computer ‘Willow’ had cracked a problem that would take a traditional computer billions of years to solve, an indication of the exponentially greater computing power quantum computing was theoretically capable of. Experts have heralded this as a Bitcoin and Nvidia killer. With this computing power, the expectation is to brute force encryption algorithms that underpin Bitcoin and other crypto currencies and hence render them exposed. Similarly, Nvidia’s GPUs became the default compute options for Generative AI, which could get undermined by quantum computers. For us laypersons, here’s a piece by Bloomberg on what exactly quantum computing is and how is it supposed to be the disruptor it is touted to be:
“How do quantum computers work?
They use tiny circuits to perform calculations, as do traditional computers. But they make these calculations in parallel, rather than sequentially, which is what makes them so fast. Regular computers process information in units called bits, which can represent one of two possible states — 0 or 1 — that correspond to whether a portion of the computer chip called a logic gate is open or closed. Before a traditional computer moves on to process the next piece of information, it must have assigned the previous piece a value.
By contrast, thanks to the “probabilistic” nature of quantum mechanics, the qubits in quantum computers don’t have to be assigned a value until the computer has finished the whole calculation. This is known as “superposition.” So whereas three bits in a conventional computer would only be able to represent one of eight possibilities – 000, 001, 010, 011, 100, 101, 110 and 111 – a quantum computer of three qubits can process all of them at the same time. A quantum computer with 4 qubits can in theory handle 16 times as much information as an equally-sized conventional computer and will keep doubling in power with every qubit that’s added. That’s why a quantum computer can process exponentially more information than a classic computer.
What’s the appeal of quantum computers?
They can do things that classical computers can’t. Google revealed in December that its latest quantum processor, Willow, had solved a problem in five minutes that the world’s most powerful supercomputers wouldn’t have been able to solve even if they had been working on it since the universe began.
Experimental quantum computers are typically given tasks that would confound a conventional computer because there are too many variable inputs. Their greatest potential is for modeling complex systems involving large numbers of moving parts whose characteristics change as they interact with one another. They might, for example, replicate the behavior of molecules to accelerate the development of new medicines, or simulate the decisions of economic actors and financial intermediaries to make market forecasting more accurate.
Quantum computers are not expected to be of much use in the laborious but simpler work fulfilled by most of today’s computers, which process a relatively limited number of isolated inputs sequentially on a mass scale.”
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