Superfast computers built on the bizarre principles of quantum physics are coming, and when they finally get here, they’re going to change everything.
Eric Ladizinsky, cofounder of the quantum computing company D-Wave, gave a great explanation of the difference between a regular computer and a quantum computer during a talk at the WIRED 2014 conference in London.
Imagine you only have five minutes to find an “X” written on a page of a book in the Library of Congress (which has 50 million books). It would be impossible. But if you were in 50 million parallel realities, and in each reality you could look through the pages of a different book, in one of those realities you would find the “X.”
In this scenario a regular computer is you running around like a crazy person trying to look through as many books as possible in five minutes. A quantum computer is you split into 50 million yous, casually flipping through one book in each reality.
If this still sounds like magic or witchcraft, you’re not alone. Physicist Richard Feynman once famously said: “If you think you understand quantum physics, you don’t understand quantum physics.”
The bottom line is that regular computers have to solve one problem at a time in sequence, but quantum computers can solve multiple problems at the same time. That kind of speed as the potential to revolutionise entire industries.
And it’s not just their speed. Quantum computers can solve the kind of complex problems that regular computers are really bad at solving. They’re more human-like in their problem solving approach, and that will make them better able to complement human tasks.
We definitely still have more tech issues to work out before we have fully-functioning quantum computers, but here are some of the most exciting future applications of quantum computing:
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