IBM is no stranger to quantum computing.
In fact, the company had allowed researchers to use one of its own quantum computers since last year. At the T.J. Watson research lab in New York, the quantum computer has been used by 40,000 users to run over 275,000 experiments. According to Quartz Media, IBM plans to use these experiments as use cases for future business opportunities.
How does quantum computing work? Quartz breaks it down:
The promise of quantum computing is that it could, in theory, lead to computers that are infinitely faster at processing information than even today’s fastest devices. Traditional computers comprise a series of transistors, electronic gates that can either be on or off (which are represented in programs as 1s and 0s). If transistors are made small enough, such as the size of a single atom, they start to exhibit the effects of quantum physics, and are referred to as “qubits.” These transistors can both be 1 and 0 at the same time, what’s called the “superposition.” A computer made of qubits can, in essence, do all the steps of a calculation simultaneously, rather than in sequence like a traditional machine. It could therefore theoretically work far faster, solving problems that would require unattainable amounts of computing power today.
IBM hopes to eventually create quantum computer with 50 qubits, where a regular laptop has about the same computational power as a 25-qubit quantum computer.
IBM hopes that quantum computers will be able to affect industries from medical drug manufacturing to cyber security to artificial intelligence creation. First, they’ll need to further the power of their quantum computers. We’ll see how that goes moving forward.
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