Quantum computing is interesting. It\u2019s really a wonderful area for research, but my feeling is we have a long way to go. Today we have examples of quantum computers\u2014hardware always arrives before software\u2014but those examples are very primitive. With a digital computer, we think of doing a computation and getting an answer. The quantum computer is instead going to give us a probability distribution of where the answer is, and you\u2019re going to make a number of, we\u2019ll call it runs on the quantum computer, and it\u2019ll give you a number of potential solutions to the problem, but it\u2019s not going to give you the answer. So it\u2019s going to be different.<\/p>\n
With quantum computing, are we caught in a moment of hype?<\/p>\n
I think unfortunately it\u2019s been oversold\u2014there\u2019s too much hype associated with quantum. The result of that typically is that people will get all excited about it, and then it doesn\u2019t live up to any of the promises that were made, and then the excitement will collapse.<\/p>\n
We\u2019ve seen this before: AI has gone through that cycle and has recovered. And now today AI is a real thing. People use it, it\u2019s productive, and it\u2019s going to serve a purpose for all of us in a very substantial way. I think quantum has to go through that winter, where people will be discouraged by it, they\u2019ll ignore it, and then there\u2019ll be some bright people who figure out how to use it and how to make it so that it is more competitive with traditional things.<\/p>\n
There are many issues that have to be worked out. Quantum computers are very easy to disturb. They\u2019re going to have a lot of \u201cfaults\u201d\u2014they will break down because of the nature of how fragile the computation is. Until we can make things more resistant to those failures, it\u2019s not going to do quite the job that we hope that it can do. I don\u2019t think we\u2019ll ever have a laptop that\u2019s a quantum laptop. I may be wrong, but certainly I don\u2019t think it\u2019ll happen in my lifetime.<\/p>\n
Quantum computers also need quantum algorithms, and today we have very few algorithms that can effectively be run on a quantum computer. So quantum computing is at its infancy, and along with that the infrastructure that will use the quantum computer. So quantum algorithms, quantum software, the techniques that we have, all of those are very primitive.<\/p>\n
When can we expect\u2014if ever\u2014the transition from traditional to quantum systems?<\/p>\n
So today we have many supercomputing centers around the world, and they have very powerful computers. Those are digital computers. Sometimes the digital computer gets augmented with something to enhance performance\u2014an accelerator. Today those accelerators are GPUs, graphics processing units. The GPU does something very well, and it just does that thing well, it\u2019s been architected to do that. In the old days, that was important for graphics; today we\u2019re refactoring that so that we can use a GPU to satisfy some of the computational needs that we have.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Quantum computing is interesting. It\u2019s really a wonderful area for research, but my feeling is we have a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":22306,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21],"tags":[363,607,371,111,139,69,375,147,12533,145],"class_list":{"0":"post-22305","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-computing","8":"tag-artificial-intelligence","9":"tag-china","10":"tag-computing","11":"tag-new-zealand","12":"tag-newzealand","13":"tag-nz","14":"tag-quantum-computing","15":"tag-science","16":"tag-supercomputers","17":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22305","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22305"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22305\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/22306"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22305"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22305"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22305"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}