Quantum computer science is interesting. It is really a wonderful area for research, but my feeling is that we still have a long way to go. Today we have examples of quantum computers – hardware always arrives before the software – but those examples are very primitive. With a digital computer, we think we do a calculation and get an answer. The quantum computer will instead give us a probability distribution of where the answer is located and you will make a series of, we will call it to run on the quantum computer and it will give you a series of potential solutions to the problem, but it will not give you the answer. So it will be different.
With the quantum calculation, are we captured in a moment of hype?
I think unfortunately was hyper -time: there is too much hype associated with the quantum. The result of this is generally that people will get excited, and therefore it is not up to any of the promises that have been made, and therefore the excitement will collapse.
We have already seen it before: the IA crossed that cycle and recovered. And now today the IA is a real thing. People use it, it is productive and will serve a purpose for all of us in a very substantial way. I think quantum should go through that winter, where people will be discouraged, they will ignore it and then there will be some bright people who will understand how to use it and how to make it so that it is more competitive with traditional things.
There are many problems that must be solved. Quantum computers are very easy to disturb. They will have many “defects”: they will break because of the nature of how fragile the calculation is. Until we can make things more resistant to those failures, it will not do enough work that we hope it can do. I don’t think we will ever have a laptop that is a quantum laptop. I could be wrong, but I certainly don’t think it will happen in my life.
Quantum computers also need quantum algorithms and today we have very few algorithms that can actually be performed on a quantum computer. So the quantum calculation is at the beginning and together with this the infrastructure that will use the quantum computer. So quantum algorithms, quantum software, the techniques we have, all are very primitive.
When can we expect, if ever – the transition from traditional to quantum systems?
So today we have many supercomputer centers all over the world and have very powerful computers. Those are digital computers. Sometimes the digital computer is increased with something to improve performance: an accelerator. Today those accelerators are GPU, graphic processing unit. The GPU does something very well, and that thing is good, it was filed. At old days, it was important for graphics; Today we react to it so that we can use a GPU to meet some of the computational needs we have.