Stephen Hawking oncesuggestedAlbert Einsteins assertion that God does not play dice with the universe was wrong.
Are we here by chance or design?
In fact, thats the basis of quantum physics.
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Theyre either going to do one thing or another.
And, until you observe them, that potential remains.
In reality, theres no such thing as a purely-quantum computer and there probably never will be.
Theyre all hybrid quantum-classical systems in one way or another.
Quantum computing
Lets start off with why we need quantum computers.
We program computers to do what we want by giving them a series of commands.
It took our species approximately 200,000 years to get that far.
The most useful lesson weve learned in our relatively recent study of quantum physics is thatparticles can become entangled.
Quantum computers allow us to harness the power of entanglement.
The mostcommonly citedexample of this is drug discovery.
to create new drugs, scientists have to study their chemical interactions.
Its a lot like looking for a needle in a never-ending field of haystacks.
Quantum computing promises to accelerate these kinds of tasks and make previously impossible computations commonplace.
But it takes more than just expensive, cutting-edge hardware to produce these ultra-fast outputs.
And, because theyre ridiculously expensive and mostly experimental, theyre almost exclusively accessed via cloud connectivity.
The point is, as Hidary also told Neural, were at an inflection point.
Quantum tech is no longer a far-future technology.
Its here in many forms today.
But the scope of this article is limited to hybrid quantum computing technologies.
For the former, you need a quantum annealing system.
And, for everything else, you need a gate-based quantum computer… probably.
Those are still very much in the early stages of development.
But companies such as D-Wave have been building quantum annealing systems for decades.
They are not yet coupled.
When they undergo quantum annealing, the couplers and biases are introduced and the qubits become entangled.
At this point, the system is in an entangled state of many possible answers.
Thats pretty much what the annealing process is.
The pin art sculpture thing is the computer and your hand is the annealing process.
Whats left behind is the minimum energy state of the problem.
Gate-based quantum computers, on the otherhand,function entirely differently.
And even the most casual of science readers have probably heard about Googles amazingtime crystalbreakthrough.
Its a seven-pointed lattice one moment and a ten-pointed lattice the next, or whatever.
Whats next for the quantum computing industry
The quantum computing industry is already thriving.
This design represents a pivotal moment in tech.
You might remember reading about quantum supremacy a few years back.
Quantum advantage is the same thing but, semantically speaking, its a bit more accurate.
Thats the very definition ofhybrid quantum computing.
As for whats next?
Its unlikely youll see a ticker-tape parade for quantum computing any time soon.
