Quantum computing is interesting. It’s a really wonderful area for research, but my feeling is that we have a long way. Today we have examples of quantum computers – appearance always arrives before software – but these examples are very primitive. With a digital computer, we think to make computing and get an answer. The quantum computer will instead give us a probable distribution of where the answer is, and you will do some, we will call it working on the quantum computer, and it will give you some possible solutions to the problem, but it will not give you the answer. So it will be different.
With quantum computing, are we caught in Hype’s moment?
I think unfortunately it was dominated – there is too much hype associated with quantity. The result of this is typically that people will be excited about it, and then it does not conform to any of the promises, and then the excitement will collapse.
We had seen this before: AI went through that cycle and recovered. And now today AI is a real thing. People use it, it is productive, and it will serve a goal for all of us very substantially. I think Quantum has to go through that winter where people will be discouraged with it, they will ignore it, and then there will be some brilliant people who will find out how to use it and how to do it so that it is more competing with traditional things.
There are many things that need to be developed. Quantitative computers are very easy to annoyed. They will have many “failures” – they will collapse due to the nature of how fragile the computing is. Until we can do things more resistant to those failures, it will not do the job that we hope it can do. I don’t think we will ever have a laptop that is a quantum laptop. I may be wrong, but I certainly don’t think it will happen in my life.
Quantitative computers also need quantitative algorithms, and today we have very few algorithms that can work effectively on a quantum computer. So quantum computing is at its childhood, and along with that the infrastructure that will use the quantum computer. So quantitative algorithms, quantum software, the techniques we have, are all very primitive.
When can we wait – if ever – the transition from traditional to quantitative systems?
So today we have many supercomputer centers around the world, and they have very powerful computers. These are digital computers. Sometimes the digital computer increases with something to improve performance – accelerator. Today these accelerators are GPUs, graphic processing units. The GPU does something very well, and it only does so well, it was filed to do so. In ancient times, this was important for graphics; Today we reaffirm that we can use GPU to satisfy some of the computer needs we have.
