Big companies are already making a great deal of research and development efforts in this new branch of computing.
Quantum computing is a different computing paradigm from that of classical computing. It is based on qubits, a particular combination of ones and zeros. A new study by the Capgemini Research Institute reveals that almost a quarter of organizations (23%) are working (or planning to work) on leveraging quantum technologies to develop at least one major business application in the next five years. Additionally, 20% of organizations expect to increase their investments in this technology over the next year.
According to the study Quantum technologies: How to prepare your organization for a quantum advantage now, China (43%) and the Netherlands (42%) have the highest proportion of companies working or planning to work on quantum technologies, far ahead of Germany and the United Kingdom (each with 26%), compared to the world average of 23%.
Today, a true quantum computer will have unimaginable applications as it did when the first transistor was manufactured in 1947. Nobody could imagine how it would end up leading to smartphones and laptops. But even quantum computing experts are beginning to worry about how some big companies explain that it will hit the market very soon.
Today’s systems are a massive scientific achievement, but they do not bring us any closer to a quantum computer that can solve problems that cannot even be posed today. According to MIT specialists, we don’t know how long it will take, but it is much further away than the industry and its vendors would have us believe.
All current computers use some form of error correction and data redundancy. Still, the laws of quantum physics place severe restrictions on how the correction is performed in the quantum computer. Professor Andrea Morello of the University of New South Wales explains in an article published in Nature that “error rates of less than 1% are typically needed to apply quantum error correction protocols. Once this goal is achieved, we can start designing silicon quantum processors that scale and work reliably to perform useful calculations.” Morello and his team have already reached that 1% rate, but the road still has a long way to go.
