In March, the Abu Dhabi-based Technology Innovation Institute (TII) announced that its Quantum Research Centre will oversee the construction of the country’s first quantum computer.
Now, the excitement of this news might be tempered by collective ignorance of what exactly quantum computing is and how it might benefit the business landscape. So, we put some very basic questions to Professor José Ignacio Latorre, chief researcher at the Quantum Research Centre, to help provide an overview of the field and why it is becoming another key pillar of the fourth industrial revolution.
In simple terms, professor, how would you describe quantum computing?
Quantum computers can perform some complex calculations in a fraction of the time required by even the world’s most powerful classical supercomputers. They do so by harnessing the phenomena of quantum mechanics – a fundamental area of physics.
The main phenomena at play are “superposition” and “entanglement”, which help quantum systems like electrons, photons and atoms create processing powers that can be exponentially stronger than those of normal computers.
In a simplified picture, one could say that superposition and entanglement allow a quantum computer to compute multiple classical calculation steps at once. This idea of doing many steps at once might lead to a computational revolution in which certain real-world problems that are currently not computable might be solved the quantum way.
So, in practical terms, what does this mean for computer processing?
Quantum computing dramatically increases the computer’s ability to process some complex calculations in real time.
Quantum logic is quite different from classical logic. For instance, the complex mathematical problem at the core of the design of RSA encryption and other public-key encryption schemes is factoring a product of two prime numbers. While classical computers can take forever to arrive at the answer, quantum computers can leverage Shor’s algorithm to carry out the factorisation of the integers in a short time.
Eventually, quantum computers will have multiple applications in fields ranging from healthcare to finance to cybersecurity, and cryptography to artificial intelligence and machine learning, among other sectors.
Where and in what ways is quantum computing being deployed right now?
The straight answer is that there is no useful quantum computer in existence currently. Google aims to develop the world’s first useful quantum computer by 2029 and there are tremendous world-wide efforts to push various quantum systems towards utilising them in a useful quantum computer.
Professor José Ignacio Latorre, chief researcher at the Quantum Research Centre.
Building a useful quantum computer is extremely hard as an ultimate level of control over many fragile qubits needs to be realised. However, I believe that the quantum computing community is well on its way through stepping up cooperation on an international level and being very open and transparent with our ideas.
What, then, will the real-world applications of quantum computing be?
Quantum computers are not being developed to replace conventional computers. Quantum computers are machines that will be used to solve specific and classically difficult problems.
Having said that, quantum computers will eventually find a place in every university as a teaching device, as well as in many organisations that have important and major computational needs.
Quantum computing applications could range from AI and machine learning to computational chemistry to drug design and development, to cybersecurity and cryptography, and from financial modelling to logistics optimisation and weather forecasting.
So, when will they have a real impact on the business world?
In reality, nobody knows when quantum computers will be used in mainstream businesses – maybe in a few years, maybe in 50. Stating anything else might grant you a place in the hall of fame of the worst tech predictions!
Quantum computers are not being developed to replace conventional computers.
However, it is fair to say that quantum computers will in all likelihood play a key role in highly specialised businesses. And maybe we will witness that they also can be brought to use in regular businesses. For sure, this would be fantastic.
Why and in what way is Abu Dhabi getting involved in quantum computing? What are the benefits to the UAE of harnessing this technology?
If we take the area of financial services, quantum computing would allow Abu Dhabi to get closer to full, technological sovereignty.
Today, in a field like finance, one is not able to carry out all the computations that one should, given the prohibitive cost and effort attached to such calculations. Quantum computing should be able to compute for a fraction of the cost and a fraction of the energy leading up to a win-win situation that enables us to save the planet and also achieve enhanced computation capabilities.
Quantum computers will also be capable of sorting through reams of data on complicated subjects like climate change to predict how it will progress. The worldwide race to build quantum computers will likely enter a very fierce period by 2023 – so, exciting times ahead!
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