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A close-up view of the IBM Q quantum computer. The processor is in the silver-colored cylinder.

Quantum computers are getting a lot more real. No, you won't be playing Call of Duty on one anytime soon. But Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Rigetti Computing and IBM all made important advances in 2019 that could help bring computers governed by the weird laws of atomic-scale physics into your life in other ways.

Google's declaration of quantum supremacywas the most headline-grabbing moment in the field. The achievement -- more limited than the grand term might suggest -- demonstrated that quantum computers could someday tackle computing problems beyond the reach of conventional "classical" computers.

Proving quantum computing progress is crucial. We're still several breakthroughs away from realizing the full vision of quantum computing. Qubits, the tiny stores of data that quantum computers use, need to be improved. So do the finicky control systems used to program and read quantum computer results. Still, today's results help justify tomorrow's research funding to sustain the technology when the flashes of hype inevitably fizzle.

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Quantum computers will live in data centers, not on your desk, when they're commercialized. They'll still be able to improve many aspects of your life, though. Money in your retirement account might grow a little faster and your packages might be delivered a little sooner as quantum computers find new ways to optimize businesses. Your electric-car battery might be a little lighter and new drugs might help you live a little longer after quantum computers unlock new molecular-level designs. Traffic may be a little lighter from better simulations.

But Google's quantum supremacy step was just one of many needed to fulfill quantum computing's promise.

"We're going to get there in cycles. We're going to have a lot of dark ages in which nothing happens for a long time," said Forrester analyst Brian Hopkins. "One day that new thing will really change the world."

Among the developments in 2019:

Classical computers, which include everything from today's smartwatches to supercomputers that occupy entire buildings, store data as bits that represent either a 1 or a 0. Quantum computers use a different approach called qubits that can represent a combination of 1 and 0 through an idea called superposition.

Ford and Microsoft adapted a quantum computing traffic simulation to run on a classical computer. The result: a traffic routing algorithm that could cut Seattle traffic congestion by 73%.

The states of multiple qubits can be linked, letting quantum computers explore lots of possible solutions to a problem at once. With each new qubit added, a quantum computer can explore double the number of possible solutions, an exponential increase not possible with classical machines.

Quantum computers, however, are finicky. It's hard to get qubits to remain stable long enough to return useful results. The act of communicating with qubits can perturb them. Engineers hope to add error correction techniques so quantum computers can tackle a much broader range of problems.

Plenty of people are quantum computing skeptics. Even some fans of the technology acknowledge we're years away from high-powered quantum computers. But already, quantum computing is a real business. Samsung, Daimler, Honda, JP Morgan Chase and Barclays are all quantum computing customers. Spending on quantum computers should reach hundreds of millions of dollars in the 2020s, and tens of billions in the 2030s, according to forecasts by Deloitte, a consultancy. China, Europe, the United States and Japan have sunk billions of dollars into investment plans. Ford and Microsoft say traffic simulation technology for quantum computers, adapted to run on classical machines, already is showing utility.

Right now quantum computers are used mostly in research. But applications with mainstream results are likely coming. The power of quantum computers is expected to allow for the creation of new materials, chemical processes and medicines by giving insight into the physics of molecules. Quantum computers will also help for greater optimization of financial investments, delivery routes and flights by crunching the numbers in situations with a large number of possible courses of action.

They'll also be used for cracking today's encryption, an idea spy agencies love, even if you might be concerned about losing your privacy or some snoop getting your password. New cryptography adapted for a quantum computing future is already underway.

Another promising application is artificial intelligence, though that may be years in the future.

"Eventually we'll be able to reinvent machine learning," Forrester's Hopkinssaid. But it'll take years of steady work in quantum computing beyond the progress of 2019. "The transformative benefits are real and big, but they are still more sci-fi and theory than they are reality."

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When asked what invention will be as revolutionary in the 2020s as smartphones were in the 2010s, Bank of America strategist Haim Isreal said, without hesitation, quantum computing.

At the banks annual year ahead event last week in New York, Israel qualified his prediction, arguing in an interview with MarketWatch that the timing of the smartphones arrival on the scene in the mid-2000s, and its massive impact on the American business landscape in the 2010s, doesnt line up neatly with quantum-computing breakthroughs, which are only now being seen, just a few weeks before the start of the 2020s.

The iPhone already debuted in 2007, enabling its real impact to be felt in the 2010s, he said, while the first business applications for quantum computing won't be seen till toward the end of the coming decade.

But, Israel argued, when all is said and done, quantum computing could be an even more radical technology in terms of its impact on businesses than the smartphone has been. This is going to be a revolution, he said.

Quantum computing is a nascent technology based on quantum theory in physics which explains the behavior of particles at the subatomic level, and states that until observed these particles can exist in different places at the same time. While normal computers store information in ones and zeros, quantum computers are not limited by the binary nature of current data processing and so can provide exponentially more computing power.

Quantum things can be in multiple places at the same time, said Chris Monroe, a University of Maryland physicist and founder of IonQ told the Associated Press . The rules are very simple, theyre just confounding.

In October, Alphabet Inc. GOOG, -0.18% subsidiary Google claimed to have achieved a breakthrough by using a quantum computer to complete a calculation in 200 seconds on a 53-qubit quantum computing chip, a task it calculated would take the fastest current super-computer 10,000 years. Earlier this month, Amazon.com Inc. AMZN, +0.03% announced its intention to collaborate with experts to develop quantum computing technologies that can be used in conjunction with its cloud computing services. International Business Machines Corp. IBM, -0.82% and Microsoft Corp. MSFT, +0.84% are also developing quantum computing technology.

Israel argued these tools will revolutionize several industries, including health care, the internet of things and cyber security. He said that pharmaceutical companies are most likely to be the first commercial users of these devices, given the explosion of data created by health care research.

Pharma companies are right now subject to Moores law in reverse, he said. They are seeing the cost of drug development doubling every nine years, as the amount of data on the human body becomes ever more onerous to process. Data on genomics doubles every 50 days, he added, arguing that only quantum computers will be able to solve the pharmaceutical industrys big-data problem.

Quantum computing will also have a major impact on cybersecurity, an issue that effects nearly every major corporation today. Currently cyber security relies on cryptographic algorithms, but quantum computings ability to solve these equations in the fraction of the time a normal computer does will render current cyber security methods obsolete.

In the future, even robust cryptographic algorithms will be substantially weakened by quantum computing, while others will no longer be secure at all, according to Swaroop Sham, senior product marketing manager at Okta.

For investors, Israel said, it is key to realize that the first one or two companies to develop commercially applicable quantum-computing will be richly rewarded with access to untold amounts of data and that will only make their software services more valuable to potential customers in a virtuous circle.

What weve learned this decade is that whoever controls the data will win big time, he said.

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Quantum computing will be the smartphone of the 2020s, says Bank of America strategist - MarketWatch

The technology has helped to improve congestion by 73 per cent in scenario-testing

Ford and Microsoft are using quantum-inspired computing technology to reduce traffic congestion. Through a joint research pilot, scientists have used the technology to simulate thousands of vehicles and their impact on congestion in the US city of Seattle.

Ford said it is still early in the project but encouraging progress has been made and it is further expanding its partnership with the tech giant.

The companies teamed up in 2018 to develop new quantum approaches running on classical computers already available to help reduce Seattles traffic congestion.

Writing on a blog post on Medium.com, Dr Ken Washington, chief technology officer, Ford Motor Company, explained that during rush hour, numerous drivers request the shortest possible routes at the same time, but current navigation services handle these requests "in a vacuum": They do not take into consideration the number of similar incoming requests, including areas where other drivers are all planning to share the same route segments, when delivering results.

What is required is a more balanced routing system that could manage all the various route requests from drivers and provide optimised route suggestions, reducing the number of vehicles on a particular road.

These and more are all variables well need to test for to ensure balanced routing can truly deliver tangible improvements for cities.

Traditional computers dont have the computational power to do this but, as Washington explained, in a quantum computer, information is processed by a quantum bit (or a qubit) and can simultaneously exist "in two different states" before it gets measured.

This ultimately enables a quantum computer to process information with a faster speed, he wrote. Attempts to simulate some specific features of a quantum computer on non-quantum hardware have led to quantum-inspired technology powerful algorithms that mimic certain quantum behaviours and run on specialised conventional hardware. That enables organisations to start realising some benefits before fully scaled quantum hardware becomes available."

Working with Microsoft, Ford tested several different possibilities, including a scenario involving as many as 5,000 vehicles each with 10 different route choices available to them simultaneously requesting routes across Metro Seattle. It reports that in 20 seconds, balanced routing suggestions were delivered to the vehicles that resulted in a 73 per cent improvement in total congestion when compared to selfish routing.

The average commute time, meanwhile, was also cut by eight per cent representing an annual reduction of more than 55,000 hours across this simulated fleet.

Based on these results, Ford is expanding its partnership with Microsoft to further improve the algorithm and understand its effectiveness in more real-world scenarios.

For example, will this method still deliver similar results when some streets are known to be closed, if route options arent equal for all drivers, or if some drivers decide to not follow suggested routes? wrote Washington. These and more are all variables well need to test for to ensure balanced routing can truly deliver tangible improvements for cities.

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Could quantum computing be the key to cracking congestion? - SmartCitiesWorld

Quantum is having a moment. In October, Google claimed to have achieved a quantum supremacy milestone. In November, Microsoft announced Azure Quantum, a cloud service that lets you tap into quantum hardware providers Honeywell, IonQ, or QCI. Last week, AWS announced Amazon Braket, a cloud service that lets you tap into quantum hardware providers D-Wave, IonQ, and Rigetti. At the Q2B 2019 quantum computing conference this week, I got a pulse for how the nascent industry is feeling.

Binary digits (bits) are the basic units of information in classical computing, while quantum bits (qubits) make up quantum computing. Bits are always in a state of 0 or 1, while qubits can be in a state of 0, 1, or a superposition of the two. Quantum computing leverages qubits to perform computations that would be much more difficult for a classical computer. Potential applications are so vast and wide (from basic optimization problems to machine learning to all sorts of modeling) that interested industries span finance, chemistry, aerospace, cryptography, and more. But its still so early that the industry is nowhere close to reaching consensus on what the transistor for qubits should look like.

Currently, your cloud quantum computing options are limited to single hardware providers, such as those from D-Wave and IBM. Amazon and Microsoft want to change that.

Enterprises and researchers interested in testing and experimenting with quantum are excited because they will be able to use different quantum processors via the same service, at least in theory. Theyre uneasy, however, because the quantum processors are so fundamentally different that its not clear how easy it will be to switch between them. D-Wave uses quantum annealing, Honeywell and IonQ use ion trap devices, and Rigetti and QCI use superconducting chips. Even the technologies that are the same have completely different architectures.

Entrepreneurs and enthusiasts are hopeful that Amazon and Microsoft will make it easier to interface with the various quantum hardware technologies. Theyre uneasy, however, because Amazon and Microsoft have not shared pricing and technical details. Plus, some of the quantum providers offer their own cloud services, so it will be difficult to suss out when it makes more sense to work with them directly.

The hardware providers themselves are excited because they get exposure to massive customer bases. Amazon and Microsoft are the worlds biggest and second biggest cloud providers, respectively. Theyre uneasy, however, because the tech giants are really just middlemen, which of course poses its own problems of costs and reliance.

At least right now, it looks like this will be the new normal. Even hardware providers that havent announced they are partnering with Amazon and/or Microsoft, like Xanadu, are in talks to do just that.

Overall at the event, excitement trumped uneasiness. If youre participating in a domain as nascent as quantum, you must be optimistic. The news this quarter all happened very quickly, but there is still a long road ahead. After all, these cloud services have only been announced. They still have to become available, gain exposure, pick up traction, become practical, prove useful, and so on.

The devil is in the details. How much are these cloud services for quantum going to cost? Amazon and Microsoft havent said. When exactly will they be available in preview or in beta? Amazon and Microsoft havent said. How will switching between different quantum processors work in practice? Amazon and Microsoft havent said.

One thing is clear. Everyone at the event was talking about the impact of the two biggest cloud providers offering quantum hardware from different companies. The clear winners? Amazon and Microsoft.

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ProBeat: AWS and Azure are generating uneasy excitement in quantum computing - VentureBeat

Google announced this fall to much fanfare that it had demonstrated quantum supremacy that is, it performed a specific quantum computation far faster than the best classical computers could achieve. IBM promptly critiqued the claim, saying that its own classical supercomputer could perform the computation at nearly the same speed with far greater fidelity and, therefore, the Google announcement should be taken with a large dose of skepticism.

This wasnt the first time someone cast doubt on quantum computing. Last year, Michel Dyakonov, a theoretical physicist at the University of Montpellier in France, offered a slew of technical reasons why practical quantum supercomputers will never be built in an article in IEEE Spectrum, the flagship journal of electrical and computer engineering.

So how can you make sense of what is going on?

As someone who has worked on quantum computing for many years, I believe that due to the inevitability of random errors in the hardware, useful quantum computers are unlikely to ever be built.

Whats a quantum computer?

To understand why, you need to understand how quantum computers work since theyre fundamentally different from classical computers.

A classical computer uses 0s and 1s to store data. These numbers could be voltages on different points in a circuit. But a quantum computer works on quantum bits, also known as qubits. You can picture them as waves that are associated with amplitude and phase.

Qubits have special properties: They can exist in superposition, where they are both 0 and 1 at the same time, and they may be entangled so they share physical properties even though they may be separated by large distances. Its a behavior that does not exist in the world of classical physics. The superposition vanishes when the experimenter interacts with the quantum state.

Due to superposition, a quantum computer with 100 qubits can represent 2100 solutions simultaneously. For certain problems, this exponential parallelism can be harnessed to create a tremendous speed advantage. Some code-breaking problems could be solved exponentially faster on a quantum machine, for example.

There is another, narrower approach to quantum computing called quantum annealing, where qubits are used to speed up optimization problems. D-Wave Systems, based in Canada, has built optimization systems that use qubits for this purpose, but critics also claim that these systems are no better than classical computers.

Regardless, companies and countries are investing massive amounts of money in quantum computing. China has developed a new quantum research facility worth US$10 billion, while the European Union has developed a 1 billion ($1.1 billion) quantum master plan. The United States National Quantum Initiative Act provides $1.2 billion to promote quantum information science over a five-year period.

Breaking encryption algorithms is a powerful motivating factor for many countries if they could do it successfully, it would give them an enormous intelligence advantage. But these investments are also promoting fundamental research in physics.

Many companies are pushing to build quantum computers, including Intel and Microsoft in addition to Google and IBM. These companies are trying to build hardware that replicates the circuit model of classical computers. However, current experimental systems have less than 100 qubits. To achieve useful computational performance, you probably need machines with hundreds of thousands of qubits.

Noise and error correction

The mathematics that underpin quantum algorithms is well established, but there are daunting engineering challenges that remain.

For computers to function properly, they must correct all small random errors. In a quantum computer, such errors arise from the non-ideal circuit elements and the interaction of the qubits with the environment around them. For these reasons the qubits can lose coherency in a fraction of a second and, therefore, the computation must be completed in even less time. If random errors which are inevitable in any physical system are not corrected, the computers results will be worthless.

In classical computers, small noise is corrected by taking advantage of a concept known as thresholding. It works like the rounding of numbers. Thus, in the transmission of integers where it is known that the error is less than 0.5, if what is received is 3.45, the received value can be corrected to 3.

Further errors can be corrected by introducing redundancy. Thus if 0 and 1 are transmitted as 000 and 111, then at most one bit-error during transmission can be corrected easily: A received 001 would be a interpreted as 0, and a received 101 would be interpreted as 1.

Quantum error correction codes are a generalization of the classical ones, but there are crucial differences. For one, the unknown qubits cannot be copied to incorporate redundancy as an error correction technique. Furthermore, errors present within the incoming data before the error-correction coding is introduced cannot be corrected.

Quantum cryptography

While the problem of noise is a serious challenge in the implementation of quantum computers, it isnt so in quantum cryptography, where people are dealing with single qubits, for single qubits can remain isolated from the environment for significant amount of time. Using quantum cryptography, two users can exchange the very large numbers known as keys, which secure data, without anyone able to break the key exchange system. Such key exchange could help secure communications between satellites and naval ships. But the actual encryption algorithm used after the key is exchanged remains classical, and therefore the encryption is theoretically no stronger than classical methods.

Quantum cryptography is being commercially used in a limited sense for high-value banking transactions. But because the two parties must be authenticated using classical protocols, and since a chain is only as strong as its weakest link, its not that different from existing systems. Banks are still using a classical-based authentication process, which itself could be used to exchange keys without loss of overall security.

Quantum cryptography technology must shift its focus to quantum transmission of information if its going to become significantly more secure than existing cryptography techniques.

Commercial-scale quantum computing challenges

While quantum cryptography holds some promise if the problems of quantum transmission can be solved, I doubt the same holds true for generalized quantum computing. Error-correction, which is fundamental to a multi-purpose computer, is such a significant challenge in quantum computers that I dont believe theyll ever be built at a commercial scale.

[ Youre smart and curious about the world. So are The Conversations authors and editors. You can get our highlights each weekend. ]

Subhash Kak, Regents Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Oklahoma State University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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