Quantum computing, once relegated to the realm of theoretical physics, is now at the forefront of a global race for technological supremacy of the twenty-first century. As nations and tech giants pour billions into research and development, the question on everyone's mind is: which of them is going to solve the quantum code?
From Silicon Valley to the cutting-edge laboratories of Europe and Asia, a quantum revolution is already in the making. It’s not about better chips or more sophisticated algorithms it’s about harnessing the rules of the quantum universe to solve problems which would take conventional computers millions of years. This article focuses on the trending and the most promising Quantum Computing ideas and their objectives.
D-Wave Systems is a Canadian company that has concentrated on a subtype known as quantum annealing. While traditional quantum computers are intended to be a general-purpose computing tool, D-Wave’s quantum annealers are intended to solve optimization problems.
The firm’s most current one is known as the Advantage which has more than 5,000 qubits and is best suited for hard computational problems in areas such as supply chain, risk evaluation, and machine learning. D-Wave has collaborated with diverse organizations such as Volkswagen and Los Alamos National Laboratory to research on real uses of their system.
Many companies became involved in the quantum computing race, and one of them is Honeywell which is traditionally involved in industrial technologies.
Their quantum computer uses trapped-ion technology, that has an advantage in terms of qubit coherence and connectivity.
In 2020, Honeywell announced that their system had achieved a quantum volume of 64, the highest in the industry at the time. The company has partnered with JPMorgan Chase to explore applications in financial services, highlighting the growing interest in quantum computing from various industries.
Another tech-oriented company from China, Alibaba, has also opted to compete in the provision of quantum computing through its cloud-based service. Alibaba allows users to access an 11-qubit quantum computer through Alibaba Cloud, making quantum computing resources available to researchers and businesses around the world. Chinese quantum agenda is in line with the efforts that other Chinese companies and the government to set up a leadership in quantum technology.
After years of extensive research, IBM has come up with a quantum system in this field of technology. It is the first fully integrated quantum computing system for businesses globally. This project is an effort to bring quantum computing out of the laboratory and into the offices and laboratories of companies. IBM has been in the beta phase with several partners across industries, finance, chemistries, and artificial intelligence among others.
In 2019, Google made a splash with its announcement that it had achieved what it called “Quantum Supremacy” – that specific moment in time where a quantum computer can solve a problem that is essentially impossible to solve on a classical computer. The experiment carried out with Google’s 53-qubit Sycamore processor was to solve a particular mathematical problem in 200 seconds, compared with 10000 years that the most powerful supercomputer in the world would require to do the same.
Researchers at Google are still refining the quantum hardware and designing quantum circuits for all sorts of uses, for example, machine learning and optimization tasks.
Among tech giants, Microsoft has been going against the mainstream idea of quantum computing with topological qubits. Unlike traditional qubits, topological qubits have been described as theoretically more robust and less sensitive to decoherence, which proves as a significant difficulty with quantum computers.
The project, which is being spearheaded by Microsoft’s Quantum Lab, wants to build a large-scale quantum computer using the aforementioned qubits. Despite the lack of a working topological qubit, success in this area would see the company provide more reliable and easier-to-deploy than the current quantum computers.
The road ahead for quantum computing is still full of technical challenges, but the progress made by tech giants illustrates that real-world applications are within reach. Many researchers have suggested that medical, financial, and energy areas are likely to be the first to integrate quantum technologies.
With quantum hardware and software rapidly advancing, the application offers nothing but promising prospects. Despite the current uncertainty of where and when quantum computers will be commonplace, they could transform whole industries by solving problems previously considered unsolvable.