Quantum computing can be very interesting. I think it’s a great area of research but we still have a lot to do. Today we have examples of quantum computers—hardware always arrives before software—but those examples are very primitive. We think about a digital machine as a device that can do a calculation and give us an answer. Quantum computers will give us the probability of the solution. You’ll make several runs, or we can call them “runs” on the computer. It’ll show you many possible solutions, but not the actual answer. It’s gonna be different.
Is quantum computing a trendy term?
I think unfortunately it’s been oversold—there’s too much hype associated with quantum. It usually leads to people getting excited, but then realizing that it does not live up the promise made.
AI went through this cycle before and recovered. AI has become a reality. The people use it. It is productive. And it will have a significant impact on all of our lives. Quantum will have to pass through a winter where it’s ignored, people are discouraged, but then some smart people figure out how it can be used to be more competitive.
It is necessary to resolve many problems. They are easy to disrupt. There’s going to be a lot. “faults”—they will break down because of the nature of how fragile the computation is. We can’t expect it to perform as well until we improve its resistance to these failures. No, I do not think that we will have laptops with the quantum technology. Although I could be mistaken, I do not think that it will ever happen.
Quantum algorithms are also needed for quantum computers. Currently, we only have few quantum algorithms which can be used on these machines. Quantum computing and the technology that uses it are still in their early stages. The quantum algorithms and quantum software that we currently have are primitive.
When can we expect—if ever—the transition from traditional to quantum systems?
Today, we have a lot of supercomputing facilities around the world. They have powerful computers. Those are digital computers. Sometimes the digital computer gets augmented with something to enhance performance—an accelerator. GPUs, or graphics processing units are the accelerators of today. It’s architected so that the GPU can do one thing very well. It used to be that graphics were the most important thing. Today, we are refactoring this so we can use the GPU for some computational needs.
