Rise of Quantum Computing era!
Quantum computers are machines that may soon grow to offer a computing advantage far surpassing predictions from Moore’s Law. Quantum computing has been theoretically shown to offer speeds that can be exponential over state-of-art classical computing.
Just like how the binary bits are used in a classical computer, in a quantum computer are quantum bits or qubits which can store information in a quantum form.
A classical binary bit can only represent a single binary value, such as 0 or 1. A qubit, however, can represent a 0, a 1, or any proportion of 0 and 1 in a superposition of both states, with a certain probability of being a 0 and a certain probability of being a 1.
Because of superposition, algorithms can process huge amounts of information in a fraction of the time.
It would take a classical computer millions of years to find the prime factors of a 2,048-bit number. Qubits could perform the calculation in just minutes.
History of research.
The notion of a quantum computer was first introduced by Richard Feynman in his 1960 “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom”, suggesting the use of quantum effects for computation.
However, it was not until the late 1970s that researchers truly began exploring the idea.
By May 1980, Paul Benioff — published the first article on quantum computation, “The computer as a physical system: A microscopic quantum mechanical Hamiltonian model of computers as represented by Turing machines”.
In 1993, the first paper describing the idea of quantum teleportation is published.
https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.70.1895
It was 1994, Peter Shor's algorithm, that caught the attention of the government, corporations, and academic scientists. Peter Shor who was then working at Bell Labs develops a quantum algorithm for factoring integers that has the potential to decrypt RSA-encrypted communications.
Interest was growing in quantum computation in early 90s.
In 1995, Peter Shor filed a patent application on a method for reducing decoherence in quantum computer memory. Shor’s patent was granted in 1998.
But Shor’s patent application wasn't the earliest patent application.
One of the earliest patent applications in quantum technology was filed by John R Schrieffer — Buuker Ramo Corp in 1962 under Quantum mechanical information storage system.
A small area of a continuous solid material is effectively used as a basic information memory storage element. The properties of the material are such that when it is subjected to an external stimulus its electrical characteristics are changed.
More specifically, quantum mechanical energy levels within the atoms immediately under the small area of the material and the occupation of these energy levels by electrons represents information stored in the memory.
A quantum computer would be able to solve certain problems, much more rapidly than a classical computer. These possibilities have accelerated the search for practical ways to construct quantum information processors.
The period ‘90 – ‘94, saw an observable patent activity under Quantum dot tunnel device, Quantum storage device, Production of space, and Quantum memory.
Japanese researchers and companies like Sony, Hitachi, were the first few ones, who were filing patents under quantum memory, and processing.
Talking about Quantum, how can we miss out on International Business Machines Corporation aka IBM.
One of the earliest patents by IBM was filed in ’96 under quantum computer, specifically a parallel architecture of quantum logic gates and quantum communication channels for achieving advantageous efficiency and computation speed.
The last decade saw an unprecedented rise in research & patent activity in quantum computing, both at the hardware and software levels.
With more than 2500 patent applications filed globally from 2010, quantum computing certainly became a hot interest area for researchers, universities, startups, corporations, and even governments.
The high research in quantum computing leads to many different designs for quantum processor hardware that exist today, some of them are photonic quantum processors, superconducting quantum processors, nuclear magnetic resonance quantum processors, ion-trap quantum processors, topological quantum processors, quantum dot quantum processors, etc
D-Wave Systems Inc., a Canadian quantum computing company filed more than 100 patent applications since 2010.
One of the recent patent applications filed by D-Wave in 2021, is related to communication between quantum computing systems and digital computing systems.
IBM, Intel, D-Wave, Microsoft, and Google are some of the companies with very high research activity under quantum computing.
Quantum processing and underlying hardware have long been considered futuristic, but they are currently starting to be developed by big corporations like Microsoft, Google, Intel, and IBM, and startups like IonQ, Rigetti, Xanadu.
The Future will combine Artificial intelligence on top of quantum computing processors, achieving exponentially improved efficiency.
The ability to build artificial neural networks capable of exploiting quantum processing will impact all the sectors that benefited from the application of machine learning algorithms.
Combining quantum computing with computational biology will revolutionize the healthcare industry. Sequencing technologies, biomedical data processing, new drug & vaccine discovery, gene therapy, to name a few.
Finance, logistics, and transportation, specifically, autonomous driving are some of the other sectors that will be disrupted by combining Quantum computing with AI.
The ability to process large amounts of data, such as very large image, audio, and video files, will impact AR/VR technologies, merging physical reality into an online/internet reality and vice-versa.
In 2019, Google demonstrated that its 54-qubit quantum computer could solve in minutes a problem that would take a classical machine 10,000 years.
Google’s recent patent application is under neural network architectures and quantum computing, specifically quantum neural network implemented by one or more quantum processors. Not Surprising!
However, one of the most important and significant contributions of quantum computing will be in mitigating climate change and handling the energy crisis the world is facing today!
Some good reads:
- https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-00533-x
- https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-02936-3
- https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-03213-z
- https://worldwide.espacenet.com/patent/search/family/068234082/publication/WO2020245013A1?q=pn%3DWO2020245013A1
- https://www.ibm.com/quantum-computing/what-is-quantum-computing/
- https://azure.microsoft.com/en-in/overview/what-is-a-qubit/#qubit-vs-bit
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A thought to fire up your neurons.
With physics, and mathematics at the core of quantum computing, the way we see or perceive reality, will be redefined!
We are living in a digital era, where everything is either 1 or 0.
The choices/decisions we make are based on only two outcomes : <1 or 0> , <pass, fail> , <failure, success>… so on.
But we know that the current digital era will end, and a new era will rise, Era of quantum computing. The outcomes can have infinite possibilities.
Our choices/decisions in the future, will not be just based on <1 or 0>, <pass, fail>, etc., It will be based on the infinite possibilities!
Think.
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Thank you!
Ankit Lekhra | Incubig | Patent & research intelligence.
Do Your Research @https://dyr.incubig.org
