Quantum computing is likely to be the most disruptive technology under development at the moment, as it will fundamentally change the computing industry, the information technology industry and eventually even society. As with most technologies with massive potential to cause large societal changes, there is currently a lot of hype around quantum computing, and it is certainly at least a few years away from being commercially available on a widespread scale. However, there are some “pre-quantum computing”—also known as “quantum-inspired”—technology solutions available to enterprises on the market today which are in use, and companies with long-term technology roadmaps can already consider the potential benefits the technology will be able to offer in the future.
While quantum computing is an extremely complicated topic, the basics are fairly easy to understand. Classical computing uses bits, either 1 or 0, in order to represent data; hence, classical computers use transistors to process information in a determined state. Classical computers work well in many scenarios, but queries with very large datasets can require extremely large numbers of GPUs to process, so solving problems with unknown variables is very difficult for classical computers. This is why supercomputers are very large and very expensive.
Quantum computers differ from classical computers as they model the behavior of subatomic particles and apply the laws of quantum mechanics in order to process data. Quantum mechanics uses qubits as opposed to bits when making calculations. Qubits, like subatomic particles, exist in an indeterminate state—they can be a 1, a 0 or both at the same time. Therefore, using qubits as opposed to bits means that the number of calculations a quantum computer can perform is considerably higher than what a classical computer can do, and therefore, extremely complicated calculations which are too complex even for today’s supercomputers will become possible to do in the future.