After decades of experimentation, billions of dollars in investment across the globe and gut-wrenching uncertainty about whether it was even physically possible, we've proven a quantum computer can work
It’s been hailed as a breakthrough on the scale of the Wright brothers’ first motorized airplane flight: a quantum computer that has done a calculation so fiendishly complex no conventional computer can do it. In the bravado that inflects computer science lingo, the feat meets the test of “quantum supremacy,” and computer scientists the world over are raising a glass in celebration.
“Today, we’re used to thinking about conventional computing as being something that solves everything,” says Emerson. “But there are certain classes of problems that conventional computing just can’t solve.” But the bizarre rules of quantum mechanics mean that something tiny like an electron or a photon doesn’t have a simple, definite state, explains Aephraim Steinberg, professor of physics at the Centre for Quantum Information and Quantum Control at the University of Toronto and co-director of CIFAR’s Quantum Information Science program.
“If you imagine replacing every bit in your computer with something that had the power to point at any point in the globe, you can already see that there’s much more information at play in that system,” Steinberg says. Those multi-tasking bits are known as qubits—short for quantum bits—and are the fundamental units of information in quantum computing. And they can be coaxed to work together, into being, as the computer world puts it, in entangled states.
“We don’t know exactly which problems quantum computers will be better at than classical computers,” Steinberg says. “We are looking constantly for other problems they might be able to solve.”
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