They still may need a decade to make this computer powerful enough and reliable enough for groundbreaking industrial applications, but clearly quantum computing has gone from science fiction to nonfiction faster than most anyone expected.
.. “Whereas normal computers store information as either a 1 or a 0, quantum computers exploit two phenomena — entanglement and superposition — to process information,”
.. The result is computers that may one day “operate 100,000 times faster than they do today,” adds Wired magazine.
.. How many different ways can you seat 10 people? It turns out, she explained, there are “3.6 million ways to arrange 10 people for dinner.”
.. Classical computers don’t solve “big versions of this problem very well at all,”
.. It’s just another reason China, the N.S.A., IBM, Intel, Microsoft and Google are now all racing — full of sweat — to build usable quantum systems.
.. “If I try to map a caffeine molecule problem on a normal computer, that computer would have to be one-tenth the volume of this planet in size,” said Arvind Krishna, head of research at IBM. “A quantum computer just three or four times the size of those we’ve built today should be able to solve that problem.”
.. Each time work gets outsourced or tasks get handed off to a machine, “we must reach up and learn a new skill or in some ways expand our capabilities