Quantum Computing (Part-I)- Future Trends of Computing

Image for representative purpose only.

What are Quantum Computers and how they are going to work?

Quantum Computing is one of the greatest technological advancement in the field of complex computation which has opened the door leading to the pathway for advance scientific and technological development in almost every field thus reducing much of effort and time behind complex calculations. We will try to explore the vast and complex world of quantum computing with a series of blogs to capture the broad idea in a simple manner. This is the first blog on Quantum Computing which discuss about the basics of quantum computing that is continuously emerging as the future trend of computing.

IT and Software giants are racing to create a truly useful quantum computer. Here's what makes quantum computers different to and what they good be used for in the near future. Quantum computing takes advantage of the strange ability of subatomic particles to exist in more than one state at any time. Due to the way the tiniest of particles behave, operations can be done much more quickly and use less energy than classical computers. In classical computing, a bit is a single piece of information that can exist in two states – 1 or 0. Quantum computing uses quantum bits, or 'qubits' instead. These are quantum systems with two states. However, unlike a usual bit, they can store much more information than just 1 or 0, because they can exist in any superposition of these values. Quantum computing is computing using quantum-mechanical phenomena, such as superposition and entanglement and the device that performs quantum computing is known as Quantum Computer. They are different from binary digital electronic computers based on transistors. Whereas common digital computing requires that the data be encoded into binary digits (bits), each of which is always in one of two definite states (0 or 1), quantum computation uses quantum bits, which can be in super-positions of states. A quantum Turing machine is a theoretical model of such a computer, and is also known as the universal quantum computer. The field of quantum computing was initiated by the work of Paul Benioff and Yuri Manin in 1980, Richard Feynman in 1982, and David Deutsch in 1985. As of 2018, the development of actual quantum computers is still in its infancy, but experiments have been carried out in which quantum computational operations were executed on a very small number of quantum bits. Both practical and theoretical research continues, and many national governments and military agencies are funding quantum computing research in additional effort to develop quantum computers for civilian, business, trade, environmental and national security purposes, such as cryptanalysis. A small 20-qubit quantum computer exists and is available for experiments via the IBM quantum experience project. D-Wave Systems has been developing their own version of a quantum computer that uses annealing. Large-scale quantum computers would theoretically be able to solve certain problems much more quickly than any classical computers that use even the best currently known algorithms, like integer factorization using Shor's algorithm (which is a quantum algorithm) and the simulation of quantum many-body systems. There exist quantum algorithms, such as Simon's algorithm, that run faster than any possible probabilistic classical algorithm. A classical computer could in principle (with exponential resources) simulate a quantum algorithm, as quantum computation does not violate the Church–Turing thesis. On the other hand, quantum computers may be able to efficiently solve problems which are not practically feasible on classical computers.

Continued in next blog...