Which technology will quantum computing impact most significantly

Summary • Today, “the metaverse” is a hot topic, garnering the attention of tech companies, business leaders and consumers. • While it’s uncertain how exactly the concept will evolve, it is grounded in technology developments that we have been tracking over the past decade. • PwC’s Essential Eight technologies like AI, blockchain and VR are converging in new ways to make the metaverse possible. • These six enabling trends are automating trust, extended reality, immersive interfaces, working autonomy, digital reflection and hyperconnected networks. There’s a lot of big talk about the metaverse — and a lot of wariness. Both are justified. That’s why it’s important for executives to understand what’s hype, what’s reality and how to navigate the opportunities and risks this evolving concept brings. Along with a grounding in the business implications, you’ll want to get up to speed on the enabling technologies. Our work in this area started nearly a decade ago, when PwC analyzed more than 250 emerging technologies to pinpoint those that would have the greatest business impact across industries. We called those with the most potential the Essential Eight. They include: artificial intelligence (AI), augmented reality (AR), blockchain, drones, Internet of Things (IoT), robotics, 3D printing and virtual reality (VR). Today, the Essential Eight continue to evolve and make their mark — with the pandemic accelerating emerging tech adoption. Some, like AI, are becoming integral to ever...

IBM has published a paper in Nature that describes a breakthrough in Quantum computing wherein they solved a complex problem that leading supercomputing approximation methods could not handle. This achievement could accelerate the timeline toward a day when scientists across disciplines could use quantum systems to solve previously intractable problems in chemistry, material science, AI and more. How they got there is an interesting story, working with error-prone qubits that operate in temperatures below that of deep space, and using classical supercomputer simulations to check the results. I'm standing next to a "chandelier"; where the final stages of cooling delivers an environment ... [+] colder than deep space, needed for the superconducting chip at the bottom to reach its quantum states. The Author IBM wanted to test the idea that the 127-qubit Eagle quantum computer could provide value for a useful problem that challenged the leading classical methods. But to do so, they had to solve two really hard problems. First, they had to obtain accurate results from an inherently noisy and error-prone quantum computer. Second, since nobody had ever ran such a large model on a quantum computer, how would they know it was correct? What Problem Did IBM Solve? Before we get to the IBM solution to these hurdles, let’s look at the problem they were solving. IBM was simulating the Ising model, a “mathematical description of ferromagnetism consisting of discrete variables that repres...

License and Republishing World Economic Forum articles may be republished in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International Public License, and in accordance with our Terms of Use. The views expressed in this article are those of the author alone and not the World Economic Forum.

Summary. Digital computing has limitations in regards to an important category of calculation called combinatorics, in which the order of data is important to the optimal solution. These complex, iterative calculations can take even the fastest computers a long time to process. Computers and software that are predicated on the assumptions of quantum mechanics have the potential to perform combinatorics and other calculations much faster, and as a result many firms are already exploring the technology, whose known and probable applications already include cybersecurity, bio-engineering, AI, finance, and complex manufacturing. Quantum technology is approaching the mainstream. Goldman Sachs To understand what’s going on, it’s useful to take a step back and examine what exactly it is that computers do. Let’s start with today’s digital technology. At its core, the digital computer is an arithmetic machine. It made performing mathematical calculations cheap and its impact on society has been immense. Advances in both hardware and software have made possible the application of all sorts of computing to products and services. Today’s cars, dishwashers, and boilers all have some kind of computer embedded in them — and that’s before we even get to smartphones and the internet. Without computers we would never have reached the moon or put satellites in orbit. These computers use binary signals (the famous 1s and 0s of code) that are measured in “bits” or bytes. The more complicated t...

Inside A Quantum Computer Qilimanjaro We’re entering the “second quantum revolution” and marketers need to begin to understand its future implications. The first quantum revolution started 100 years ago in the 1920’s with the discoveries of Albert Einstein and others, that lead to innovations like lasers, solar cells, atomic clocks used in GPS, semiconductors, and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). For decades since, the tremendous potential of quantum in many areas has been largely theoretical, until that past 20 years when a number of critical developments emerged: - Refrigeration equipment was developed that can reach temperatures close to absolute zero (−459.67 °F), the temperature at which quantum systems are least disturbed by “thermal noise”. This extremely low temperature is required for quantum computers to do their work, isolated from the surrounding environment. Quantum computing involves the transfer and computation of information at the sub-atomic level. According to a January 2023 article Time Magazine as well as other sources, quantum computers can calculate millions of times faster than a personal computer. Quantum is expected to dramatically increase the capabilities of artificial intelligence. It can process many different scenarios simultaneously, to optimize solutions to problems. Vs. today’s computer algorithms, quantum algorithms can be trained faster, you can run more hypotheses, and it’s better at determining correlations from massive amounts of data...

1 2 Quantum computers are better at guessing, new study demonstrates Researchers leverage techniques to manage error accumulation, demonstrating the potential of quantum computing in the error-prone NISQ era Date: June 5, 2023 Source: University of Southern California Summary: Researchers have demonstrated a quantum speedup over the most efficient classical computer algorithm possible for what is believed to be the first time. The accomplishment was performed on an IBM Montreal Quantum Falcon r4 27-qubit device. Share: Daniel Lidar, the Viterbi Professor of Engineering at USC and Director of the USC Center for Quantum Information Science & Technology, and first author Dr. Bibek Pokharel, a Research Scientist at IBM Quantum, achieved this quantum speedup advantage in the context of a "bitstring guessing game." They managed strings up to 26 bits long, significantly larger than previously possible, by effectively suppressing errors typically seen at this scale. (A bit is a binary number that is either zero or one). Quantum computers promise to solve certain problems with an advantage that increases as the problems increase in complexity. However, they are also highly prone to errors, or noise. The challenge, says Lidar, is "to obtain an advantage in the real world where today's quantum computers are still 'noisy.'" This noise-prone condition of current quantum computing is termed the "NISQ" (Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum) era, a term adapted from the RISC architecture used...

The Talbot effect forms periodic patterns from laser light (simulation). Single atom qubits can be stored and processed at the high intensity points (red). Credit: TU Darmstadt/APQ Darmstadt physicists have developed a technique that could overcome one of the biggest hurdles in building a practically-relevant quantum computer. They make use of an optical effect here discovered by British photo pioneer William Talbot in 1836. The team led by Malte Schlosser and Gerhard Birkl from the Institute of Applied Physics at Technische Universität Darmstadt presents this success in the journal Physical Review Letters. Quantum computers are able to solve certain tasks much quicker even than supercomputers. However, there have so far only been prototypes with a maximum of a few hundred " Quantum computers with many thousands, if not several millions, of qubits would be required for practical applications, such as optimizing complex traffic flows. However, adding qubits consumes resources, such as laser output, which has so far hampered the development of quantum computers. The Darmstadt team has now shown how the optical Talbot effect can be used to increase the number of qubits from several hundred to over ten thousand without proportionally requiring additional resources. Qubits can be realized in different ways. Tech giants such as Google, for instance, use artificially manufactured superconducting circuit elements. However, individual atoms are also excellent for this purpose. To c...

Enjoy more free content and benefits by creating an account Saving articles to read later requires an IEEE Spectrum account The Institute content is only available for members Downloading full PDF issues is exclusive for IEEE Members Access to Spectrum's Digital Edition is exclusive for IEEE Members Following topics is a feature exclusive for IEEE Members Adding your response to an article requires an IEEE Spectrum account Create an account to access more content and features on IEEE Spectrum, including the ability to save articles to read later, download Spectrum Collections, and participate in conversations with readers and editors. For more exclusive content and features, consider Join the world’s largest professional organization devoted to engineering and applied sciences and get access to all of Spectrum’s articles, archives, PDF downloads, and other benefits. Simulating how air and gases flow through a jet engine is one of the most challenging With scores of fan blades spinning at thousands of rotations a second, and airflows measuring in hundreds of kilometers per hour, modeling the inner workings of a jet turbine is incredibly complex. But it’s also critical for designing more powerful and efficient engines, something that’s becoming increasingly important as the aviation industry attempts to reduce its climate impact. Rolls-Royce already makes wide use of CFD simulations in its design processes, but the enormous computational resources required means its engineer...

Summary. Digital computing has limitations in regards to an important category of calculation called combinatorics, in which the order of data is important to the optimal solution. These complex, iterative calculations can take even the fastest computers a long time to process. Computers and software that are predicated on the assumptions of quantum mechanics have the potential to perform combinatorics and other calculations much faster, and as a result many firms are already exploring the technology, whose known and probable applications already include cybersecurity, bio-engineering, AI, finance, and complex manufacturing. Quantum technology is approaching the mainstream. Goldman Sachs To understand what’s going on, it’s useful to take a step back and examine what exactly it is that computers do. Let’s start with today’s digital technology. At its core, the digital computer is an arithmetic machine. It made performing mathematical calculations cheap and its impact on society has been immense. Advances in both hardware and software have made possible the application of all sorts of computing to products and services. Today’s cars, dishwashers, and boilers all have some kind of computer embedded in them — and that’s before we even get to smartphones and the internet. Without computers we would never have reached the moon or put satellites in orbit. These computers use binary signals (the famous 1s and 0s of code) that are measured in “bits” or bytes. The more complicated t...

IBM has published a paper in Nature that describes a breakthrough in Quantum computing wherein they solved a complex problem that leading supercomputing approximation methods could not handle. This achievement could accelerate the timeline toward a day when scientists across disciplines could use quantum systems to solve previously intractable problems in chemistry, material science, AI and more. How they got there is an interesting story, working with error-prone qubits that operate in temperatures below that of deep space, and using classical supercomputer simulations to check the results. I'm standing next to a "chandelier"; where the final stages of cooling delivers an environment ... [+] colder than deep space, needed for the superconducting chip at the bottom to reach its quantum states. The Author IBM wanted to test the idea that the 127-qubit Eagle quantum computer could provide value for a useful problem that challenged the leading classical methods. But to do so, they had to solve two really hard problems. First, they had to obtain accurate results from an inherently noisy and error-prone quantum computer. Second, since nobody had ever ran such a large model on a quantum computer, how would they know it was correct? What Problem Did IBM Solve? Before we get to the IBM solution to these hurdles, let’s look at the problem they were solving. IBM was simulating the Ising model, a “mathematical description of ferromagnetism consisting of discrete variables that repres...