Consider three hair-pulling problems: 1 percent of the world’s energy is used every year just to produce fertilizer; solar panels aren’t powerful enough to provide all the power for most homes; investing in stocks often feels like a game of Russian roulette.
Those seemingly disparate issues can be solved by the same tool, according to some scientists: quantum computing. Quantum computers use superconducting particles to perform tasks and have long been seen as a luxury for the top academic echelon—far removed from the common individual. But that’s quickly changing.
IBM had been dabbling with commercial possibilities when last year it released Quantum Experience, a cloud-based quantum computing service researchers could use to run experiments without having to buy a quantum system. In early March, IBM took that program further and announced IBM Q, the first cloud quantum computing system for commercial use. Companies will be able to buy time on IBM’s quantum computers in New York state, though IBM has not set a release date or price, and it is expected to be financially prohibitive for smaller companies at first.
Jarrod McClean, a computing sciences fellow at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, says the announcement is exciting because quantum computing wasn’t expected to hit commercial markets for decades. Last year, some experts estimated commercial experimentation could be five to 40 years away, yet here we are, and the potential applications could disrupt the way pharmaceutical companies make medicine, the way logistics companies schedule trains and the way hedge fund managers gain an edge in the stock market. “We’re seeing more application areas start to develop all the time, now that people are looking at quantum,” McClean says.
Quantum computing is as different from traditional computing as an abacus is from a MacBook. “Classical computing was [invented] in the 1940s. This is like [that creation], but even beyond it,” says Scott Crowder, IBM Systems vice president and chief technology officer of quantum computing, technical strategy and transformation. “Take everything you know about how a class of computers works and forget it.”
Besting supercomputers
Quantum computers are made up of parts called qubits, also known as quantum bits. On some problems, they leverage the strange physics of quantum mechanics to work faster than chips on a traditional computer. (Just as a plane cannot exactly compare to a race car, a classical computer will still be able to do some things better than quantum, and vice versa. They’re just different.)
Explaining how qubits work requires jumping into quantum mechanics, which doesn’t follow the same rules of physics we’re used to in our everyday lives. Quantum entanglement and quantum superposition are particularly important; they defy common sense but take place only in environments that are incredibly tiny.
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Jim Bell