What exactly is Quantum Computing all about? As its name suggests, quantum computing is based on the laws of quantum physics, applying them to the deepest level of the things our world is made of. Here, the laws of Newtonian physics are no longer valid, and things behave like waves and particles at the same time. Electrons, e.g., may adopt not only two states alternatively, but also anything in between. The states in between are called “superposition”. Applied to computing, this has a far-reaching consequence: While traditional computers use bits and rely on binary logic, the so-called “qubits” that make up quantum computers can assume a third stage – the “superposition”, in which it is still unclear if they emerge from it with a value of 0 or 1. This enables them to calculate faster – in fact, a lot faster: in the case of a recent experiment conducted by the Chinese Hefei University of Technology, 100 trillion times as fast as a conventional computer.
The technological challenges are still immense, though. To name just a few: superposition can be achieved for fractions of a second only. It is extremely sensitive to external “noise”; therefore, it needs to be kept in a highly protected environment. For example, “superconducting qubits”, which are one of the technologies to realise quantum computers, need to operate at extremely low temperatures and in a vacuum. Still, the promises of quantum computing are so enormous that these challenges seem worth tackling.
Quantum computing began in the early 1980s, when physicist Paul Benioff proposed a quantum mechanical model of the Turing machine. Richard Feynman and Yuri Manin later suggested that a quantum computer had the potential to simulate things that a classical computer could not.
In 1994, US mathematician Peter Shor formulated a quantum algorithm for a problem which was too difficult to solve by conventional means. This was followed by various other algorithms with the same objective. One of them is Grover’s algorithm, a quantum search algorithm devised by the Indian American computer scientist Lov Kumar Grover enabling a quadratic speedup of calculations. The model developed by JoS QUANTUM is based on a Grover algorithm and uses “imperfect Grover oracles.”