What Are We Waiting for? A recent discussion from nanalyze opens up the question of “what are we waiting for?” The point is much is being done with the quantum computing world but many are still waiting for it to arrive. We know how to be patient at The Qubit Report. Recommend taking a look at the whole piece.
What are we waiting for? How quantum computing software gets built. Key excerpts:
- A lot of what many of these companies talk about seems to be around public relations. IBM’s most recent “AI breakthrough in quantum computing” was all over the media, but when the press release ends in “we are still far off from achieving Quantum Advantage for machine learning” it seems to be more about keeping up public appearance… The question remains. With all the efforts being made on the hardware front, how far are we away from being able to do something – anything – useful with quantum computers?
- They’re not just sitting around waiting for whatever it is we’re all waiting for. Instead, they’re already working with some big clients to solve some big problems… A few years back, 1QBit began working with Dow Chemical to develop quantum computing applications for materials science and to improve their discovery process by helping them better understand new chemicals and materials. In the financial world, they count three major financial institutions as clients and have even developed some alternative data sets that “infer trader price expectations with a sentiment model driven by options and futures positions.” These are available through the CME DataMine offering alongside data from RS Metrics and Orbital Insights… In the insurance world, they count Allianz as both a customer and an investor. In healthcare, they’ve helped Biogen develop novel algorithms for drug discovery. In short, they’ve built a solid business that can thrive whether quantum supremacy gets here or not. And according to Mr. Downs, he’s optimistic about what’s been happening lately and introduced us to the term “quantum inspired”. As the name implies, “quantum inspired” refers to new approaches we can take to optimize algorithms that result from inspirations we encounter while researching quantum computing.
- There’s only one problem though. We may not know when that use case gets here because it’s highly likely that whoever develops that use case doesn’t want anyone else to know about it. It’s not some big conspiracy theory, but rather the fact that whoever gets the “quantum advantage” doesn’t necessarily want everyone else to know about it. It’s the same reason why all of 1QBit’s clients demand such high levels of confidentiality around what they’re working on. Still, Mr. Down speculates that the first viable use case may come in the area of quantum chemistry.
- 1QBIt has a viable business, whether quantum computing gets here or not, but what excites them most is the notion of being able to run algorithms on a quantum computer someday. These are algorithms that have been theoretically proven to work on a quantum computer, not just ideas.
Excerpts sourced from nanalyze, How Quantum Computing Software Gets Built…
