The Age Of Quantum Computing

Previously posted on my Medium blog

Its been a while since Quantum Technology was popularized,quantum technology may change the way most computers works. Traditionally computers processes data using binary digits 1 and 0; 0 means that a small voltage must be applied to the system while 1 means that a larger voltage needs to be applied for instance “five volts”. Whenever you click on the link using your mouse or track-pad, a binary value is sent to the system, that binary value could be either 1 or 0 depending on the operating system that you are using. However, according to quantum technology, computers must go to through the binary values of 1 and 0 at the same time instead of going back and forth between voltages smaller and larger voltages.

“Although quantum mechanics has been around for nearly 70 years, it is still not generally understood or appreciated, even by those that use it to do calculations.” Stephen Hawking

The problem with quantum computers is that they are not very compatible with our existing technologies; imagine that “1" represent right click and “0” represents the left click, now you left click the mouse on a quantum computer and a signal of “10" get sent to the computer. What would happen with the current technology when implemented in a quantum computer, is that your operating system would say that you left clicked which is correct but then it would say that you also right clicked at the same time which is false; leading to further errors. Yet there are advantages of using quantum computing, a quantum computer has great processing power- in normal computers, if your software application tries to identify whether a searched file, then it would have to check each each file on a specified path one by one to see whether its attributes matches the search criteria. On the other hand, a quantum computer would simply check all the files on the specified path at once with very little delay when compared to the traditional computing systems. Quantum computers have a great number of applications, here’s a list of them.

Quantum computing applications

• Preventing energy loss in electrical cables.
• Improving machine learning capabilities.
• Solving optimization problems in robotics.
• Handling big data better.

Programmable quantum computers already exists and the Canadian company D-Wave recently open source their quantum software development tool called “qbsolv”. One day quantum computers may be available for commercial use, that’s it for this blog post, feel free to check out my other article if you this one.