Although recent findings have poured cold water on quantum computing hype, don’t count the technology out yet. On 4 March, Google and XPrize announced a US $5 million prize to anyone who comes up with use cases for quantum computers. If that sounds like an admission that use cases don’t already exist, it isn’t, says Ryan Babbush, head of quantum algorithms at Google. “We do know of some applications that these devices would be quite impactful for,” he says.
“A quantum computer is a special purpose accelerator,” says Matthias Troyer, corporate vice president of Microsoft Quantum and member of the Xprize competition’s advisory board. “It can have a huge impact for special problems where quantum mechanics can help you solve them.”
The kinds of problems for which quantum computers could be useful hark back to their historical roots. In 1981, physicist Richard Feynman proposed the idea of a quantum computer as a means of simulating the full complexity of the quantum world.
Since then, scientists have come up with ingenious algorithms to make quantum computers useful for non-quantum things, such as searching databases or breaking cryptography. However, the database search algorithms don’t promise viable speedups in the foreseeable future, and destroying Internet security seems like a dubious reason to build a new machine. But a recent study suggests that quantum computers will be able to simulate quantum phenomena of interest to several industries well before they can make headway in those other applications.
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