Computers keep getting faster. So much so, the smart phone in your pocket is estimated to have more than 100,000 times the processing power than Apollo 11’s computer that helped land astronauts on the moon half a century ago.
And soon, even the supercomputers of today will look quaint; quantum computing, an emerging technology, has the potential to solve problems significantly more complex than the computers we have today.
“Solutions that would take other computers half an hour to compute, the quantum computer could do in half a second,” says Larry Fast, software engineer and Science World educator.
That’s because quantum computing fundamentally works differently than the computers we’re familiar with.
“In normal computing, we have bits that can represent a zero or one,” says Fast. “The fascinating thing about quantum is: the quantum bit doesn't know what it is. It is both a zero and one until we look at the final answer.
“When you combine this with the appropriate algorithms for computing, instead of eight bits with a well-defined value, you have eight bits tied together with all the values overlapping simultaneously. That enables it to be exponentially faster than our current computers.”
This capacity offers major potential for today’s biggest computing challenges, like weather and climate simulations, which take existing data for the past and current climate and use it to simulate how that might change in the future.
“These simulations require a tremendous amount of computing time,” Fast says. “It's a huge job for even the biggest computers we currently have.”
Quantum computing could significantly reduce the time it takes to run these simulations and that increased speed will enable more frequent and more detailed simulations, Fast says. All of which could mean far more effective monitoring of the current state of the planet, as well as its future.
There is a major caveat though.
“Quantum computing doesn’t quite work yet,” Fast says. It still requires hours and hours—sometimes even days—of programming, he says, so the speed is only impressive if you don’t factor in all that upfront time.
“Soon we'll get quantum computers that are 10 times faster than normal computers, and then 100 times faster, and then eventually 1000 times faster,” Fast says.
Unlike Artificial Intelligence (AI), which Fast says is a fundamental change in the character of computing, quantum is more of an acceleration, a technology that itself could enable even more innovation.
“Quantum will enable us to invent the next thing after AI,” he says. “Something that will require huge amounts of computing power.”
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