Today, the leading companies of the world like GOOGLE, MICROSOFT, INTEL, IBM and many more are doing a fascinating thing – the QUANTUM COMPUTERS.
Quantum computers are going to bring the revolution in this world which has the potential to change your life completely.
It’s not difficult to understand them. Let’s take the challenge to understand Quantum Computers.
1.What makes Quantum Computers different?
2.How do they actually work?
3.What amazing things they can do?
The computers we use today, still take hundreds of years to solve complex problems like Weather Forecasting or Space Explorations.Quantum Computers can solve them in minutes. They have extremely High Computational Power.
1.What makes quantum Quantum computers different?
The charm lies in those QUBITS (Quantum Binary Digit).
Let’s understand the BITS (Binary Digits ) first.
Computers you use at your home or office, compute all the data in 1s and 0s which can also be interpreted as ‘ TRUE and FALSE’ or ‘ON and OFF’.
We humans communicate through verbal language (like English, Hindi, Spanish etc. ) while computers use the language of 1s and 0s, also called the Binary language.They use BITS: 1s and 0s (HIGH voltage or LOW voltage, in technical terms) to store all the data and and to do all the operations. This way, Computers have enabled amazing things.
But the problem arises when the numbers of BITS to deal with becomes really really large while doing Climate Research or simulations of birth of Universe.
So we have QUBITS for such complex tasks.
The phenomenon that makes QUBITS so fabulous is QUANTUM SUPERPOSITION.
QUANTUM SUPERPOSITION : It simply means to be one or more possible conditions at the same time; like a spinning coin which shows both HEADS and TAILS at the same time or electron having spin UP and spin DOWN at a moment or a BIT having value 1 and 0 simultaneously in the computer. Yes I know, it’s a bit wierd but it’s TRUE.
This is the main Physics of Quantum Computers.
2.How Do They Actually Work ?
Compared to classical computers , Quantum Computers approach a problem in very different way.
A simple example could explain it the best.
Say we ask the Coffee machine ,” Can I have a cup of coffee?”
Computer fitted in the coffee machine will show : “Please Wait.”
Classical computer would process this in 4 operations.
- Is milk available? yes.
- Are coffee beans available? yes.
- Is sugar available? yes.
- Electric power available? yes.
Decision taken. Result is :” Your coffee is being prepared.”
Whereas Quantum Computer would do this in just 1 operation(Although we won’t use Quantum Computers to make coffee) :
Is milk, sugar, coffee beans and electric power available?
Decision taken(quickly). Result is “your coffee is being processed”
This shows Quantum Computers are very time-efficient. Here’s the catch.They don’t perform the operation itself faster instead they perform multiple operations at the same time.The number the operations to arrive at the result is exponentially smaller in Quantum Computer. Thus it makes the lengthy process short and quick . ( How? We will talk about this terminology later in the article.)
Let’s talk in Technical terms now.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o45t5frN3KI
3.What Amazing Things Quantum Computers Can Do?
This is a very interesting question to answer.They can do extremely amazing things beyond our imagination. They promise to be faster,safer and better at solving certain kinds of problem. This is how Quantum Computers would change the world :
Cyber security: Quantum Computers can check all the criminal activities happening online. Let’s see how. Quantum computers are super efficient at factoring. Prime factorization of very very big number can help us decrypt encrypted messages to prevent criminal activities like data leakage.
- Artificial Intelligence: This is the field where Quantum Computers will aid the most . They are going to make it even more efficient and reliable then ever before due to its accuracy and precision.
- Computational parallelism: QC can sort, Filter, search through, and process big data much more quickly than today’s best computers.
There are many other fields where QC would help : Aerodynamic research,Oil ans Gas exploration,Computing the structure and properties of Chemical Compounds ans Space exploration.
Also, that’s not just it. Still we are developing them into more efficiently programmable Quantum Computer. As researchers and scientists go further deep into it, we will get to know more excellent uses of it. It’s going to bring a revolution, for sure. The Quantum Revolution.
“Today, quantum computing is a researcher’s playground . In five years, it will be the mainstream.” – IBM
Stay Curious