Quantum Computing — A new wave in software and IT industry
By: Siddharth Saraf
Tags: Quantum Computing

Till now almost every single person who is working in IT industry has heard about Artificial Intelligence and some are currently working in this field. This technology promised to solve problems which were very costly and time consuming for traditional software. It started a new Era of Automation with minimum amount of human intervention required.

However there are still some problems which can’t be solved even with the help of AI on traditional hardware. There are two reasons or we can say two dimensions of this problem : from Software (logical) and hardware (physical). Let’s first see the physical problem.

All the electronic devices has three basic components called : inductor, capacitor and resister. Along with these transistor plays a main role. Transistors assimilated in millions of number make IC s( Integrated Chips) which are brain of any smart device. With advancement of technology , size of these transistors decreased and hence the size of IC , but the power of ICs increased. This is what predicted by Gordon Moore and his law called Moor’s law.

Now the size of transistor has been reduced to 10 nm ( 1000000000th of a meter) being manufactured by Intel. Even mobile phones that we carry around today has such small transistors. Qualcomm’s Snapdragon processors that are inside many popular mobiles like Samsung, Oneplus, Xiomi, Oppo, Vivo are equipped with such technology. Samsung 5g mobile will be equipped with Sanpdragon 855 processors which will be having 7 nm technology !! The atoms used in silicon chip fabrication are around 0.2nm. Now, you would be right in thinking that you can get hundreds of atoms into 22 or 16nm — but that’s not the size of individual transistors; that’s actually a measure of the distance between discrete components on a chip. In the case of the 22nm chips — a process that only Intel has mastered and will come to market with Ivy Brige — the high-κ dielectric layer is just 0.5nm thick; just two or three atoms!

As we are nearing the size of atom , we have reached our limit to reduce the size of transistor. It’s not that we can’t create smaller transistor, but you see when things become as small as an atom the rule of Physics that we see in our day to day life, doesn’t obey there. Quantum Physics takes the reign and the strange world of Quantum mechanics plays its card !! With such small size Transistor will face Quantum Tunneling effect and they will produce wrong result even though all the arrangement of computation is perfect. Hence we can’t improve our traditional hardware technology.

Coming to second dimension of the problem: software or algorithms. As we mentioned there are certain kind of problem which are IMPOSSIBLE to solve with fastest of fastest supercomputers that are ever built or will be built in future. Such a problem is call P Vs NP problem. The P versus NP problem is a major unsolved problem in computer science. It asks whether every problem whose solution can be quickly verified (technically, verified in polynomial time) can also be solved quickly (again, in polynomial time). This looks like a very simple thing but trust me it’s way more important in real life and once solved will give rise to faster transportation methods, faster wifi/internet speed, can solve earth’s population problem and yes faster computers !!

To solve this, a new generation of computer has arrived which uses Quantum mechanics . This computer is so insane and out of this world that I didn’t believe if I can see such computers in my life time. But it has progressed so much that we can build program in this computer. I will not go deep into the working of this Quantum computer since it needs understanding of Quantum physics ( which I have been reading since last 3 years in my spare time ) and cryogenics. But in simple term it uses qubits (Quantum Bits ) instead of bits to store and operate on data. Unlike bits which has only 2 fixed states : 0 or 1 , qubits can have these 2 states along with states where it can be both 0 &1 simultaneously. So where a 2-bit register in an ordinary computer can store only one of four binary configurations (00, 01, 10, or 11) at any given time, a 2-qubit register in a quantum computer can store all four numbers simultaneously, because each qubit represents two values.

The number of computations that a quantum computer could undertake is 2^n, where n is the number of qubits used. A quantum computer comprised of 500 qubits would have a potential to do 2⁵⁰⁰ calculations in a single step. This is an awesome number — 2⁵⁰⁰ is infinitely more atoms than there are in the known universe (this is true parallel processing — classical computers today, even so-called parallel processors, still only truly do one thing at a time: there are just two or more of them doing it). But how will these particles interact with each other? They would do so via quantum entanglement.

Now all the tech giants of the world are in race to Quantum Computer supremacy. Companies like Google, Microsoft, IBM, Amazon, NASA, Aliyun (Alibaba Cloud) and various government institutions are building Quantum computer. Below is a list of organizations involved in building Quantum computer and yes Accenture is also involved in this.

(-Source : WikiPedia)

Initially the quantum computers were being used for R&D purpose, now they have entered mainstream IT industry. One more company called Rigetti ( You can click at this hyperlink to view their mind-blowing work) has even built API and SDK for any developer in any part of the word to access and code in quantum computer via their cloud facility. A good news is Microsoft , Google and Brilliant ( an online education company ) has collaborated to offer Quantum computing course to any enthusiast and developer. Anyone can access link : https://brilliant.org/courses/quantum-computing/ and learn this course.

Just to show the power of Quantum computer , below is a true scenario from www.pbs.org website :

Can’t a regular computer factor a 500-digit number?

A conventional, classical digital computer could, indeed, factor a 500-digit number, but the only known methods are basically, well, let’s try these two numbers and multiply them together and see if it’s this big number. Let’s try these other two numbers. The problem is that there are gagillions — that’s a technical term — there are gagillions of numbers that could be multiplied together, and to explore all those numbers would essentially take the age of the universe on a conventional digital computer, even the biggest supercomputers.

Yes , a calculation which will take 14 Billion years to complete, on a Quantum computer, that can be accomplished in couple of minutes !!

This is a new beginning , a new world to live in where we will access not only infrastructure of present reality, but we can access resources from parallel realities !! To know more you can do research about how Quantum mechanics access different realities — I know these are stuffs of Science Fiction movies, but to our surprise, these are not Fiction anymore..!!