Quantum computing is a rapidly-emerging technology that harnesses the laws of quantum mechanics to solve problems too complex for classical computers. IBM Quantum is a company that makes real quantum hardware, a tool scientists only began to imagine three decades ago, and now available to thousands of developers. These machines are very different from classic computers, around for over half a century.
Why do we need quantum computers? In some circumstances supercomputers aren’t entirely super. When scientists and engineers run into difficult problems, they often look towards supercomputers. These are very large classic computers that often include thousands of classic CPU and GPU cores. However, even supercomputers struggle to solve certain kinds of problems. If a supercomputer gets stumped, that's probably because the big classical machine was asked to solve a problem with a high degree of complexity. Complex problems are problems with lots of variables interacting in complicated ways. Modeling the behavior of individual atoms in a molecule is a complex problem, because of all the different electrons interacting with one another. Sorting out the ideal routes for a few hundred tankers in a global shipping network is complex too.
Why are quantum computers faster? Take this for example: A supercomputer might be great at difficult tasks like sorting through a big database of protein sequences. But it will struggle to see the subtle patterns in that data that determine how those proteins behave. A little biology knowledge: proteins are long strings of amino acids that become useful biological machines when they fold into complex shapes. Figuring out how proteins will fold is a problem with important implications for biology and medicine. A classical supercomputer might try to fold a protein with brute force, leveraging its many processors to check every possible way of bending the chemical chain before arriving at an answer. But as the protein sequences get longer and more complex, the supercomputer stalls. A chain of 100 amino acids could theoretically fold in any one of many trillions of ways. No computer has the working memory to handle all the possible combinations of individual folds.
Quantum computers are built for complexity. Quantum algorithms take a new approach to these sorts of complex problems -- creating multidimensional spaces where the patterns linking individual data points emerge. Classical computers can not create these computational spaces, so they can not find these patterns. In the case of proteins, there are already early quantum algorithms that can find folding patterns in entirely new, more efficient ways, without the laborious checking procedures of classical computers. As quantum hardware scales and these algorithms advance, they could tackle protein folding problems too complex for any supercomputer.
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By: Zubin Sidhu
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References:
“What Is Quantum Computing? | IBM.” How Do Quantum Computers Work?, www.ibm.com/topics/quantum-computing. Accessed 1 May 2022.
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