Tech Trends in Practice

TREND 21Quantum Computing

The One-Sentence Definition

The cheap smart phones we carry in our pockets today are thousands of times more powerful than the computers used to put humans on the moon just half a century ago, while the arrival of quantum computing will make today’s state-of-the-art look Stone-Aged.

What Is Quantum Computing?

Traditional computers may have grown exponentially more powerful over the last century, but at their heart they are still just very fast versions of the simplest electronic calculators. They are only capable of processing one “bit” of information at a time, in the form of a binary 1 or 0.

Quantum computing harnesses the peculiar phenomenon observed to take place when operating at a subatomic level – such as quantum entanglement, quantum tunneling, and the ability of quantum particles to apparently simultaneously exist in more than one state. Using these methods, it has been demonstrated that it is possible to build machines capable of operating far more quickly than the fastest processors available today – potentially hundreds of millions of times faster, in fact.¹

Researchers at Google – who announced this year to have completed the world’s first calculation using quantum computers that would be impossible to complete on non-quantum machines – have said that the development will lead to the shattering of Moore’s Law.² Moore’s Law was defined in 1965 and states that computing power will double roughly every two years.

As an example of this ...