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by Tom Koulopoulos

The next era of computing will stretch our minds into a spooky new world that were just starting to understand.

In 1946 the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer, or the ENIAC, was introduced. The worlds first commercial computer was intended to be used by the military to project the trajectory of missiles, doing in a few seconds what it would otherwise take a human mathematician about three days. Its 20,000 vacuum tubes (the glowing glass light bulb-like predecessors to the transistor) connected by 500,000 hand soldered wires were a marvel of human ingenuity and technology.

Imagine if it were possible to go back to the developers and users of that early marvel and make the case that in 70 years there would be ten billion computers worldwide and half of the worlds population would be walking around with computers 100,000,000 times as powerful as the ENIAC in their pants pockets.

Youd have been considered a lunatic!

I want you to keep that in mind as you resist the temptation to do the same to me because of what Im about to share.

Quantum Supremacy

Digital computers will soon reach the limits of demanding technologies such as AI. Consider just the impact of these two projection: by 2025 driverless cars alone may produce as much data as exists in the entire world today; fully digitizing every cell in the human body would exceed ten times all of the data stored globally today. In these and many more cases we need to find ways to deal with unprecedented amounts of data and complexity. Enter quantum computing.

Youve likely heard of quantum computing. Amazingly, its a concept as old as digital computers. However, you may have discounted it as a far off future thats about as relevant to your life as flying cars. Well, it may be time to reconsider. Quantum computing is progressing at a rate that is surprising even those who are building it.

Understanding what quantum computers are and how they work challenges much of what we know of not just computing, but the basics of how the physical world appears to operate. Quantum mechanics, the basis for quantum computing, describes the odd and non-intuitive way the universe operates at a sub-atomic level. Its part science, part theory, and part philosophy.

Classical digital computers use what are called bits, something most all of us are familiar with. A bit can be a one or a zero. Quantum computers use what are called qubits (quantum bits). A quibit can also be a one or a zero but it can also be an infinite number of possibilities in between the two. The thing about qubits is that while a digital bit is always either on (1) or off (0), a qubit is always in whats called a superposition state, neither on nor off.

Although its a rough analogy, think of a qubit as a spinning coin thats just been flipped in the dark. While its spinning is it heads or tails? Its at the same time both and neither until it stops spinning and we then shine a light on it. However, a binary bit is like a coin that has a switch to make it glow in the dark. If I asked you Is it glowing? there would only be two answers, yes or no, and those would not change as it spins.

Thats what a qubit is like when compared to a classical digital bit. A quibit does not have a state until you effectively shine a light on it, while a binary bit maintains its state until that state is manually or mechanically changed.

Dont get too hung up on that analogy because as you get deeper into the quantum world trying to use what we know of the physical world is always a very rough and ultimately flawed way to describe the way things operate at the quantum level of matter.

However, the difficulty in understanding how quantum computers works hasnt stopped their progress. Google engineers recently talked about how the quantum computers they are building are progressing so fast that that they may achieve the elusive goal of whats called quantum supremacy (the point at which quantum computers can exceed the ability of classical binary computer) within months. While that may be a bit of stretch, even conservative projections put us on a 5-year timeline for quantum supremacy.

Quantum vs Classical Computing

Quantum computers, which are built using these qubits, will not replace all classical digital computers, but they will become an indispensable part of how we use computers to model the world and to integrate artificial intelligence into our lives.

Quantum computing will be one of the most radical shifts in the history of science, likely outpacing any advances weve seen to date with prior technological revolutions, such as the advent of semiconductors. They will enable us to take on problems that would take even the most powerful classical supercomputers millions or even billions of years to solve. Thats not just because quantum computers are faster but because they can approach problem solving with massive parallelism using the qualities of how quantum particles behave.

The irony is that the same thing that makes quantum computers so difficult to understand, their harnessing of natures smallest particles, also gives them the ability to precisely simulate the biological world at its most detailed. This means that we can model everything from chemical reactions, to biology, to pharmaceuticals, to the inner workings of the universe, to the spread of pandemics, in ways that were simply impossible with classical computers.

A Higher Power

The reason for the all of the hype behind the rate at which quantum computers are evolving has to do with whats called doubly exponential growth.

The exponential growth that most of us are familiar with, and which is being talked about lately, refers to the classical doubling phenomenon. For example, Moores law, which projects the doubling in the density of transistors on a silicon chip every 18 months. Its hard to wrap our linear brains around exponential growth, but its nearly impossible to wrap them around doubly exponential growth.

Doubly exponential growth simply has no analog in the physical world. Doubly exponential growth means that you are raising a number to a power and then raising that to another power. It looks like this 510^10.

What this means is that while a binary computer can store 256 states with 8 bits (28), a quantum computer with eight qubits (recall that a qubit is the conceptual equivalent of a digital bit in a classical computer) can store 1077 bits of data! Thats a number with 77 zeros, or, to put it into perspective, scientists estimate that there are 1078 atoms in the entire visible universe.

Even Einstein had difficulty with entanglement calling it, spooky action at a distance.

By the way, just to further illustrate the point, if you add one more qubit the number of bits (or more precisely, states) that can be stored just jumped to 10154 (one more bit in a classical computer would only raise the capacity to 1078).

Heres whats really mind blowing about quantum computing (as if what we just described isnt already mind-blowing enough.) A single caffeine molecule is made up of 24 atoms and it can have 1048 quantum states (there are only 1050 atoms that make up the Earth). Modeling caffeine precisely is simply not possible with classical computers. Using the worlds fastest super computer it would take 100,000,000,000,000 times the age of the universe to process the 1048 calculations that represent all of the possible states of a caffeine molecule!

So, the obvious question is, How could any computer, quantum or otherwise, take on something of that magnitude? Well, how does nature do it? That cup of coffee youre drinking has trillions of caffeine molecules and nature is doing just fine handling all of the quantum states they are in. Since nature is a quantum machine what better way to model it than a quantum computer?

Spooky Action

The other aspect of quantum computing that challenges our understanding of how the quantum world works is whats called entanglement. Entanglement describes a phenomenon in which two quantum particles are connected in such a way that no matter how great the distance between them they will both have the same state when they are measured.

At first blush that doesnt seem to be all that novel. After all, if I were to paint two balls red and then separate them by the distance of the universe, both would still be red. However, the state of a quantum object is always in whats called a superposition, meaning that it has no inherent state. Think of our coin flip example from earlier where the coin is in a superposition state until it stops spinning.

If instead of a color its two states were up or down it would always be in both states while also in neither state, that is until an observation or measurement forces it to pick a state. Again, think back to the spinning coin.

Now imagine two coins entangled and flipped simultaneously at different ends of the universe. Once you stop the spin of one coin and reveal that its heads the other coin would instantly stop spinning and also be heads.

If this makes your head hurt, youre in good company. Even Einstein had difficulty with entanglement calling it, spooky action at a distance. His concern was that the two objects couldnt communicate at a speed faster than the speed of light. Whats especially spooky about this phenomenon is that the two objects arent communicating at all in any classical sense of the term communication.

Entanglement creates the potential for all sorts of advances in computing, from how we create 100 percent secure communications against cyberthreats, to the ultimate possibility of teleportation.

Room For Possibility

So, should you run out a buy a quantum computer? Well, its not that easy. Qubits need to be super cooled and are exceptionally finicky particles that require an enormous room-sized apparatus and overhead. Not unlike the ENIAC once did.

You can however use a quantum computer for free or lease its use for more sophisticated applications For example, IBMs Q, is available both as an open source learning environment for anyone as well as a powerful tool for fintech users. However, Ill warn you that even if youre accustomed to programming computers, it will still feel as though youre teaching yourself to think in an entirely foreign language.

The truth is that we might as well be surrounded by 20,000 glowing vacuum tubes and 500,000 hand soldered wires. We can barely imagine what the impact of quantum computing will be in ten to twenty years. No more so than the early users of the ENIAC could have predicted the mind-boggling ways in which we use digital computers today.

Listen in to my two podcasts with scientists from IBM, MIT, and Harvard to find out more about quantum computing. Quantum Computing Part I, Quantum Computing Part II

This article was originally published on Inc.

Image credit: Pixabay

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Tom Koulopoulos is the author of 10 books and founder of the Delphi Group, a 25-year-old Boston-based think tank and a past Inc. 500 company that focuses on innovation and the future of business. He tweets from @tkspeaks.

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Delta Air Lines is embarking on a multi-year collaborative effort with IBM including joining theIBM Q Networkto explore the potential capabilities of quantum computing to transform experiences for customers and employees.

"Partnering with innovative companies like IBM is one way Delta stays on the leading edge of tech to better serve our customers and our people, while drawing the blueprints for application across our industry," saidRahul Samant, Delta's CIO. "We've done this most recently with biometrics in our international terminals and we're excited to explore how quantum computing can be applied to address challenges across the day of travel."

TheIBM Q Network is a global community of Fortune 500 companies, startups, academic institutions and research labs working to advance quantum computing and explore practical applications.

Additionally, through theIBM Q Hub at NC State University, Delta will have access to the IBM Q Network's fleet of universal hardware quantum computersfor commercial use cases and fundamental research, including the recently-announced 53-qubit quantum computer, which, the company says, has the most qubits of a universal quantum computer available for external access in the industry, to date.

"We are very excited by the addition of Delta to our list of collaborators working with us on building practical quantum computing applications," said director of IBM ResearchDario Gil. "IBM's focus, since we put the very first quantum computer on the cloud in 2016, has been to move quantum computing beyond isolated lab experiments conducted by a handful of organizations, into the hands of tens of thousands of users. We believe a clear advantage will be awarded to early adopters in the era of quantum computing and with partners like Delta, we're already making significant progress on that mission."

For more information about the IBM Q Network, go to http://www.ibm.com/quantum-computing/network/overview

Read the rest here:
Delta Partners with IBM to Explore Quantum Computing - Database Trends and Applications

The past decade saw technological advancements that transformed how we work, live, and learn. The next one will bring even greater change as quantum computing, cloud computing, 5G, and artificial intelligence mature and proliferate. These changes will happen rapidly, and the work to manage their impact will need to keep pace.

This session at the World Economic Forum, in Davos, Switzerland, brought together industry experts to discuss how these technologies will shape the next decade, followed by a panel discussion about the challenges and benefits this era will bring and if the world can control the technology it creates.

Henry Blodget, CEO, cofounder, and editorial director, Insider Inc.

This interview is part of a partnership between Business Insider and Microsoft at the 2020 World Economic Forum. Business Insider editors independently decided on the topics broached and questions asked.

Below, find each of the panelists' most memorable contributions:

Julie Love, senior director of quantum business development, Microsoft Microsoft

Julie Love believes global problems such as climate change can potentially be solved far more quickly and easily through developments in quantum computing.

She said: "We [Microsoft] think about problems that we're facing: problems that are caused by the destruction of the environment; by climate change, and [that require] optimization of our natural resources, [such as] global food production."

"It's quantum computing that really a lot of us scientists and technologists are looking for to solve these problems. We can have the promise of solving them exponentially faster, which is incredibly profound. And that the reason is this: [quantum] technology speaks the language of nature.

"By computing the way that nature computes, there's so much information contained in these atoms and molecules. Nature doesn't think about a chemical reaction; nature doesn't have to do some complex computation. It's inherent in the material itself.

Love claimed that, if harnessed in this way, quantum computing could allow scientists to design a compound that could remove carbon from the air. She added that researchers will need to be "really pragmatic and practical about how we take this from, from science fiction into the here-and-now."

Justine Cassell, a professor specializing in AI and linguistics. YouTube/Business Insider

"I believe the future of AI is actually interdependence, collaboration, and cooperation between people and systems, both at the macro [and micro] levels," said Cassell, who is also a faculty member of the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University.

"At the macro-level, [look], for example, at robots on the factory floor," she said. "Today, there's been a lot of fear about how autonomous they actually are. First of all, they're often dangerous. They're so autonomous, you have to get out of their way. And it would be nice if they were more interdependent if we could be there at the same time as they are. But also, there is no factory floor where any person is autonomous.

In Cassell's view, AI systems could also end up being built collaboratively with experts from non-tech domains, such as psychologists.

"Today, tools [for building AI systems] are mostly machine learning tools," she noted. "And they are, as you've heard a million times, black boxes. You give [the AI system] lots of examples. You say: 'This is somebody being polite. That is somebody being impolite. Learn about that.' But when they build a system that's polite, you don't know why they did that.

"What I'd like to see is systems that allow us to have these bottom-up, black-box approaches from machine learning, but also have, for example, psychologists in there, saying 'that's not actually really polite,' or 'it's polite in the way that you don't ever want to hear.'"

Microsoft president Brad Smith. YouTube/Business Insider

"One thing I constantly wish is that there was a more standardized measurement for everybody to report how much they're spending per employee on employee training because that really doesn't exist, when you think about it," said Smith, Microsoft's president and chief legal officer since 2015.

"I think, anecdotally, one can get a pretty strong sense that if you go back to the 1980s and 1990s employers invested a huge amount in employee training around technology. It was teaching you how to use MS-DOS, or Windows, or how to use Word or Excel interestingly, things that employers don't really feel obliged to teach employees today.

"Learning doesn't stop when you leave school. We're going to have to work a little bit harder. And that's true for everyone.

He added that this creates a further requirement: to make sure the skills people do pick up as they navigate life are easily recognizable by other employers.

"Ultimately, there's a wide variety of post-secondary credentials. The key is to have credentials that employers recognize as being valuable. It's why LinkedIn and others are so focused on new credentialing systems. Now, the good news is that should make things cheaper. It all should be more accessible.

"But I do think that to go back to where I started employers are going to have to invest more [in employee training]. And we're going to have to find some ways to do it in a manner that perhaps is a little more standardized."

Nokia president and CEO, Rajeev Suri. YouTube/Business Insider

Suri said 5G will be able to help develop industries that go far beyond entertainment and telecoms, and will impact physical or manual industries such as manufacturing.

"The thing about 5G is that it's built for machine-type communications. When we received the whole idea of 5G, it was 'how do we get not just human beings to interact with each other, but also large machines," he said.

"So we think that there is a large economic boost possible from 5G and 5G-enabled technologies because it would underpin many of these other technologies, especially in the physical industries."

Suri cited manufacturing, healthcare, and agriculture as just some of the industries 5G could help become far more productive within a decade.

He added: "Yes, we'll get movies and entertainment faster, but it is about a lot of physical industries that didn't quite digitize yet. Especially in the physical industries, we [Nokia] think that the [productivity] gains could be as much as 35% starting in the year 2028 starting with the US first, and then going out into other geographies, like India, China, the European Union, and so on.

Excerpt from:
LIVE FROM DAVOS: Henry Blodget leads panel on the next decade of tech - Business Insider Nordic

On Oct. 23, 2019, Google published a paper in the journal Nature entitled Quantum supremacy using a programmable superconducting processor. The tech giant announced its achievement of a much vaunted goal: quantum supremacy.

This perhaps ill-chosen term (coined by physicist John Preskill) is meant to convey the huge speedup that processors based on quantum-mechanical systems are predicted to exhibit, relative to even the fastest classical computers.

Googles benchmark was achieved on a new type of quantum processor, code-named Sycamore, consisting of 54 independently addressable superconducting junction devices (of which only 53 were working for the demonstration).

Each of these devices allows the storage of one bit of quantum information. In contrast to the bits in a classical computer, which can only store one of two states (0 or 1 in the digital language of binary code), a quantum bit qbit can store information in a coherent superposition state which can be considered to contain fractional amounts of both 0 and 1.

Sycamore uses technology developed by the superconductivity research group of physicist John Martinis at the University of California, Santa Barbara. The entire Sycamore system must be kept cold at cryogenic temperatures using special helium dilution refrigeration technology. Because of the immense challenge involved in keeping such a large system near the absolute zero of temperature, it is a technological tour de force.

The Google researchers demonstrated that the performance of their quantum processor in sampling the output of a pseudo-random quantum circuit was vastly better than a classical computer chip like the kind in our laptops could achieve. Just how vastly became a point of contention, and the story was not without intrigue.

An inadvertent leak of the Google groups paper on the NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS) occurred a month prior to publication, during the blackout period when Nature prohibits discussion by the authors regarding as-yet-unpublished papers. The lapse was momentary, but long enough that The Financial Times, The Verge and other outlets picked up the story.

A well-known quantum computing blog by computer scientist Scott Aaronson contained some oblique references to the leak. The reason for this obliqueness became clear when the paper was finally published online and Aaronson could at last reveal himself to be one of the reviewers.

The story had a further controversial twist when the Google groups claims were immediately countered by IBMs quantum computing group. IBM shared a preprint posted on the ArXiv (an online repository for academic papers that have yet to go through peer review) and a blog post dated Oct. 21, 2019 (note the date!).

While the Google group had claimed that a classical (super)computer would require 10,000 years to simulate the same 53-qbit random quantum circuit sampling task that their Sycamore processor could do in 200 seconds, the IBM researchers showed a method that could reduce the classical computation time to a mere matter of days.

However, the IBM classical computation would have to be carried out on the worlds fastest supercomputer the IBM-developed Summit OLCF-4 at Oak Ridge National Labs in Tennessee with clever use of secondary storage to achieve this benchmark.

While of great interest to researchers like myself working on hardware technologies related to quantum information, and important in terms of establishing academic bragging rights, the IBM-versus-Google aspect of the story is probably less relevant to the general public interested in all things quantum.

For the average citizen, the mere fact that a 53-qbit device could beat the worlds fastest supercomputer (containing more than 10,000 multi-core processors) is undoubtedly impressive. Now we must try to imagine what may come next.

The reality of quantum computing today is that very impressive strides have been made on the hardware front. A wide array of credible quantum computing hardware platforms now exist, including ion traps, superconducting device arrays similar to those in Googles Sycamore system and isolated electrons trapped in NV-centres in diamond.

These and other systems are all now in play, each with benefits and drawbacks. So far researchers and engineers have been making steady technological progress in developing these different hardware platforms for quantum computing.

What has lagged quite a bit behind are custom-designed algorithms (computer programs) designed to run on quantum computers and able to take full advantage of possible quantum speed-ups. While several notable quantum algorithms exist Shors algorithm for factorization, for example, which has applications in cryptography, and Grovers algorithm, which might prove useful in database search applications the total set of quantum algorithms remains rather small.

Much of the early interest (and funding) in quantum computing was spurred by the possibility of quantum-enabled advances in cryptography and code-breaking. A huge number of online interactions ranging from confidential communications to financial transactions require secure and encrypted messages, and modern cryptography relies on the difficulty of factoring large numbers to achieve this encryption.

Quantum computing could be very disruptive in this space, as Shors algorithm could make code-breaking much faster, while quantum-based encryption methods would allow detection of any eavesdroppers.

The interest various agencies have in unbreakable codes for secure military and financial communications has been a major driver of research in quantum computing. It is worth noting that all these code-making and code-breaking applications of quantum computing ignore to some extent the fact that no system is perfectly secure; there will always be a backdoor, because there will always be a non-quantum human element that can be compromised.

More appealing for the non-espionage and non-hacker communities in other words, the rest of us are the possible applications of quantum computation to solve very difficult problems that are effectively unsolvable using classical computers.

Ironically, many of these problems emerge when we try to use classical computers to solve quantum-mechanical problems, such as quantum chemistry problems that could be relevant for drug design and various challenges in condensed matter physics including a number related to high-temperature superconductivity.

So where are we in the wonderful and wild world of quantum computation?

In recent years, we have had many convincing demonstrations that qbits can be created, stored, manipulated and read using a number of futuristic-sounding quantum hardware platforms. But the algorithms lag. So while the prospect of quantum computing is fascinating, it will likely be a long time before we have quantum equivalents of the silicon chips that power our versatile modern computing devices.

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Google claims to have invented a quantum computer, but IBM begs to differ - The Conversation CA

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We are at an inflection point

Ever since Professor Alan Turing proposed the principle of the modern computer in 1936, computing has come a long way. While advancements to date have been promising, the future is even brighter, all thanks to quantum computing, which performs calculations based on the behaviour of particles at the sub-atomic level, writes Kalyan Kumar, CVP and CTO IT Services,HCL Technologies.

Quantum computing promises to unleash unimaginable computing power thats not only capable of addressing current computational limits, but unearthing new solutions to unsolved scientific and social mysteries. Whats more, thanks to increasing advancement since the 1980s, quantum computing can now drive some incredible social and business transformations.

Quantum computing holds immense promise in defining a positive, inclusive and human centric future, which is what theWEF Future Council on Quantum Computingenvisages. The most anticipated uses of quantum computing are driven by its potential to simulate quantum structures and behaviours across chemicals and materials. This promise is being seen guardedly by current scientists who claim quantum computing is still far from making a meaningful impact.

This said, quantum computing is expected to open amazing and much-needed possibilities in medical research. Drug development time, which usually takes more than 10 to 12 years with billions of dollars of investment, is expected to reduce considerably, alongside the potential to explore unique chemical compositions that may just be beyond the limits of current classical computing. Quantum computing can also help with more accurate weather forecasting, and provide accurate information that can help save tremendous amounts of agriculture production from damage.

Quantum computing promises a better and improved future, and while humans are poised to benefit greatly from this revolution, businesses too can expect unapparelled value.

When it comes to quantum computing, it can be said that much of the world is at the they dont know what they dont know stage. Proof points are appearing, and it is seemingly becoming clear that quantum computing solves problems that cannot be addressed by todays computers. Within transportation, for example, quantum computing is being used to develop battery and self-driving technologies, while Volkswagen has also been using quantum computing to match patterns and predict traffic conditions in advance, ensuring a smoother movement of traffic. In supply chains, logistics and trading are receiving a significant boost from the greater computing power and high-resolution modelling quantum computing provides, adding a huge amount of intelligence using new approaches to machine learning.

The possibilities for businesses are immense and go way beyond these examples mentioned above, in domains such as healthcare, financial services and IT. Yet a new approach is required. The companies that succeed in quantum computing will be those that create value chains to exploit the new insights, and form a management system to match the high-resolution view of the business that will emerge.

While there are some initial stage quantum devices already available, these are still far from what the world has been envisaging. Top multinational technology companies have been investing considerably in this field, but they still have some way to go. There has recently been talk of prototype quantum computers performing computations that would have previously taken 10,000 years in just 200 seconds. Though of course impressive, this is just one of the many steps needed to achieve the highest success in quantum computing.

It is vital to understand how and when we are going to adopt quantum computing, so we know the right time to act. The aforementioned prototype should be a wakeup call to early adopters who are seeking to find ways to create a durable competitive advantage. We even recently saw a business announcing its plans to make a prototype quantum computer available on its cloud, something we will all be able to buy or access some time from now. If organisations truly understand the value and applications of quantum computing, they will be able to create new products and services that nobody else has. However, productising and embedding quantum computing into products may take a little more time.

One important question arises from all this: are we witnessing the beginning of the end for classical computing? When looking at the facts, it seems not. With the advent of complete and practical quantum computers, were seeing a hybrid computing model emerging where digital binary computers will co-process and co-exist with quantum Qbit computers. The processing and resource sharing needs are expected to be optimised using real time analysis, where quantum takes over exponential computational tasks. To say the least, quantum computing is not about replacing digital computing, but about coexistence enabling composed computing that handles different tasks at the same time similar to humans having left and right brains for analytical and artistic dominance.

If one things for sure, its that we are at an inflection point, witnessing what could arguably be one of the most disruptive changes in human existence. Having a systematic and planned approach to adoption of quantum computing will not only take some of its mystery away, but reveal its true strategic value, helping us to know when and how to become part of this once in a lifetime revolution.

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