D-wave’s Murray Thom tells SiliconRepublic.com that the tech is not just a thing of the future.

Quantum computing is often seen as a thing of the future – or the near future, if we take Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s words from earlier this year.

Quantum will start solving real-world problems in the coming years, the CEO declared at the company’s GTC Paris developer conference this June. “Quantum computing is reaching an inflection point,” he said.

In an interview with SiliconRepublic.com, Murray Thom, D-wave’s vice-president of quantum technology evangelism takes a more nuanced approach. Quantum computing has various applications, some of which are “many years away, and some of the applications are [possible] today”, he says.

Thom has spent 23 years at D-wave, during which time he has worked on designing different subcomponents on quantum computers, and even hand built a few quantum computers.

Grocery stores and telecoms networks

The consulting firm McKinsey finds that the whole of the quantum industry, which includes three major pillars – quantum computing, quantum communication and quantum sensing, could together generate up to $97bn in revenue by 2035.

Simply put, quantum computing utilises the unique behaviours of quantum physics to its advantage, giving it exponential power to compute at a scale much faster than traditional computing.

“In practical terms, quantum computers are just energy-efficient computers for hard problems,” Thom says. He explains that particular quantum capabilities that are years away have been tied in with the whole industry, adding to the confusion around what the tech can actually achieve, and when.

For example, D-wave’s quantum computers are already being used in various industries.

“[The] annealing model uses quantum effects to help it move between clean solutions more quickly, which is really useful for optimisation applications like workforce scheduling,” says Thom.

In a nutshell, quantum annealing is a way of using the intrinsic abilities of quantum physics to solve specific types of optimisation and sampling-related problems.

D-wave’s annealing model is used by Pattison Food Group, which owns several grocery brands in Canada, including Save On Foods, Nesters Market and PriceSmart Foods. The company has rolled out two applications, an at-home grocery delivery driver scheduling system, which, Thom says has increased time efficiency for Pattison by 80pc.

While a new workforce scheduling model for the company has already made it through its first phase of action. Thom says that their client is “expecting their workforce to save 50,000 hours with that application”.

While in Japan, NTT Docomo, a mobile phone operator owned by Nippon Telegraph and Telephone, is using quantum tech to optimise the paging signals which pass from cellphone towers to users.

“They’ve been able to reduce the number of those paging signals by 15pc during peak lows,” says Thom, “which effectively increases the capacity of their entire network. They’re deploying that across 250,000 base stations in Japan.”

D-wave tech is also used by Turkey’s Ford Otosan in production and streamlining the manufacturing processes for a line of its vehicles. The company says that the application, which uses annealing quantum computing, has improved vehicle production sequencing at the vehicle manufacturer.

Finance

Quantum capabilities have a “very close connection” with applications in the “finance space, the commercial banking space, in the fintech sector, maybe even in the financial services sector”, explains Thom.

A survey by the Bank of Finland earlier this year found that quantum technology has the potential to reshape financial business activities “significantly” in the long term. Risk management, stress tests and scenario analyses were seen as some of its key benefits to the sector.

Elaborating on its capabilities, Thom tells me about a published case study, where Caixa Bank used D-wave’s system to save 90pc of the time it generally takes to perform bond portfolio optimisation and portfolio optimisation hedging.

While in another case, D-wave is working with MasterCard to explore quantum optimisation applications around allocating rewards programs to customers. This application is currently in an active market test. The company is also exploring using quantum to identify hidden flows of funds in cases such as money laundering.

However, given the sensitivity of the data processed, the financial sector tends to go to the “build” route rather than purchase systems from third parties, Thom says.

Although the tech brings added security capabilities, financial institutions and other industries are concerned about the data decryption.

80pc of the survey respondents told the previously mentioned Bank of Finland survey that they were monitoring quantum tech from an information security perspective.

Quantum decryption not profitable

“I don’t think quantum computers are necessarily going to develop in a direction to decrypt codes, because that’s not a marketable product,” Thom says.

That’s not to say that bad actors using the tech do not pose a threat to existing security protocols.

“As well as super-charging the cybersecurity attacks themselves, quantum computation is likely to be able to break even the strongest of classical computing cryptography algorithms soon,” said TCS’ Ganesh Subramanya in a piece for SiliconRepublic.com last year.

But Thom says that decryption is “not a main driver for the development of quantum computers because it causes problems – but it’s not the solution to those problems”.

To be clear, recommending businesses to move toward cryptographic protocols that are quantum secure is good advice, he explains.

However, with the technological capabilities of quantum developing at a rapid pace, “it is difficult to control surprise” when it comes to data security, Thom says. “If you’re a business or a hospital that’s transmitting medical data, it’s not just important that that information is secure today, it has to remain secure for 20 years in the future.

“And so, if you want to control surprise, then you want to make sure that you’re using a protocol that can’t potentially fall victim to it for decades.”

Which is why, according to the quantum evangelist, classical algorithms and other kinds of quantum technology are more useful for encrypting data for long periods rather than quantum computers themselves.

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