Since the milestone event of Google's first "quantum supremacy" in 2019, the field of quantum computing has begun to flourish. The year 2021 that has just passed is undoubtedly a year of hot development of a new round of "quantum revolution".
In this year, there are many exciting technological breakthroughs brought by Academician Pan Jianwei, IBM, Google and other quantum computing "big god teams", there are D-Wave, Turing quantum, origin quantum, quantitative rotation technology and other quantum enterprises booming, and even such as "quantum reading" and other ironic rubbing heat events, which triggered netizens ' "indecision, quantum mechanics" sighs.
Coming to the capital market, this highly revolutionary potential industry naturally cannot escape the eyes of venture capitalists, and 2021 has become a bumper harvest year for corporate financing in this field. According to the Securities Times, in the first half of 21 years alone, VC/PE funds invested $258 million in quantum computing technology, more than the same period in 2020.
It is worth mentioning that more than 70% of this money goes to quantum hardware companies such as D-Wave, Rigetti and PsiQuantum. In addition to the continuous breakthrough of technology and the continuous growth of computing power, in recent years, the increasing focus on commercialization may also be one of the reasons why quantum computing companies are favored by capital.
In 2012, American physicist John Preskill called "quantum computers far more computationally powerful than any classical computer" as "quantum supremacy," and the term has spread ever since. However, Google, which achieved this milestone for the first time, did not show the significance of this achievement outside the lab, which was questioned by many institutions.
Subsequently, IBM, which has been exploring the application of quantum computing, proposed the concept of "Quantum Advantage", arguing that the industry should step up efforts to gain scientific and commercial advantages by applying the super computing power of quantum computers in practical applications.
Since then, researchers have slowly shifted their attention to some of the more practical goals, and quantum computing has begun many attempts to move from the laboratory to real-world applications.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai next to a Google quantum computer, Source: Visual China compared to classical computers, the advantages and disadvantages of quantum computers
In simple terms, a quantum computer is a computer made from the principles of quantum mechanics. At present, classical computers and quantitative computers have a mutual victory and defeat.
(1) Advantages
Unlike classical computers that use fast and scalable macroscopic techniques such as CMOS for circuit fabrication, operate with logic gates, and output deterministic features, quantum computers implement circuits with slow and sophisticated microscopic techniques such as nuclear magnetic resonance. At the same time, due to quantum superposition, entanglement and other characteristics, the quantum computer output has a probabilistic nature.
In addition, compared with classical computers, because quantum naturally has superposition, each qubit can not only be expressed as 0, 1, but also can be 0, 1 multiplied by any coefficient and then superimposed, so the quantum computer theoretical performance is stronger.
As we all know, Moore's Law has the judgment that the number of transistors that can hold on an integrated circuit doubles every 18 months, in other words, the performance of the processor doubles every two years. However, compared with quantum computers, the linear growth rate of computing power on classical computers can be called "crotch pulling". Theoretically, as the number of qubits increases, the computing power of quantum computers will rise exponentially and rapidly!
Taking the "nine chapters" quantum computing prototype led by Academician Pan Jianwei as an example, the "nine chapters" built by 76 photons to solve the mathematical algorithm "Gaussian Bose Sampling" only takes 200 seconds to process 50 million samples, while it takes 600 million years to use the world's fastest supercomputer in the same period. This achievement is a remarkable milestone for Chinese scientists at the forefront of highly competitive quantum technology.
As a result, quantum computers have the ability to solve problems that unified computers cannot solve in real time frames, and current technologies that require thousands of years of computation can be reduced to a few hours.
However, although in theory, quantum computers have huge information carrying and super parallel processing capabilities that classical computing cannot match, it has to be admitted that it is still in a very preliminary stage, and at the same time, it also has its own disadvantages.
(2) Disadvantages
It is worth noting that quantum computers are not capable of "comprehensively hanging" classical computers. At present, for some specific, especially optimization problems, scientists can design efficient quantum algorithms, so quantum computers have shown superior performance. However, for problems without quantum algorithms, quantum computers have no advantages, such as simple addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division logic operations.
At present, whether it is Google's "plane wood" processing "random line sampling", or "nine chapters" solving "Gaussian Bose sampling", or D-Wave's annealing optimization, it can only be used to solve a specific problem or a certain type of problem.
In addition, it is very subtle and error-prone. Because any type of vibration affects subatomic particles such as atoms and electrons, quantum computers can experience noise or even malfunction.
At the same time, quantum processors are very unstable. In order to maintain the stability of quantum computers, scientists need to keep them working at temperatures below 0.2 Kelvin (-272.95 °C, very close to absolute zero), which is no easy task to create and maintain.
Therefore, at present, quantum computers cannot "enter the homes of ordinary people", and quantum companies now hope to open the market at the TO B end.
The road ahead is long, and comrades still need to work hard
Anyone who has studied quantum computing in depth will know that it will have a huge impact on it, business, economics and other aspects of society. A world with exponentially increasing computing power, quantum error correction, a quantum internet, and a host of quantum supercomputing will be a very different space from the world we live in today.
Until then, however, the road ahead is still long. Earlier, Academician Pan Jianwei said:
"It's not a one-time job, it's a competition between faster classical algorithms and ever-improving quantum computing hardware."
Academician Pan Jianwei is making a science popularization report with the theme of "New Quantum Revolution", picture source: Visual China
(1) Technically
First of all, from a technical point of view, at present, a variety of hardware technology routes coexist, and engineering research and development is still facing challenges. The Chinese Academy of Information and Communications Technology mentioned in the latest "Research Report on the Development and Application of Quantum Information Technology":
"According to the realization of the qubit two-energy level system and the preparation and control scheme, the quantum computing processor has a variety of technical routes such as superconductivity, ion trap, silicon-based semiconductors and optical quanta, and is still in a state of parallel development and open competition, and there is no convergence trend of technical route fusion."
For the current quantum computer can only solve a specific problem, according to Xinhua net, Academician Pan Jianwei explained that the current materials available to build a quantum computer are limited, and can only "cook on the ingredients", and the breakthrough of the future quantum computer is more likely to rely on the innovation of new materials in quantum computing hardware.
At the same time, as mentioned earlier, similar to the classical mainframe of the 1960s, for a long time, quantum mainframes may still be large and fragile machines, requiring ultra-low temperatures and complex control systems to keep them running.
In addition, it is worth mentioning that as with the development of any emerging thing, quantum computing is not without risks. First of all, its strong computing power poses a great threat to password security, with strong computing power, even through exhaustive methods can easily crack a lot of keys; secondly, subversive quantum computing will also make the current computer theory into the dust, the classical computer field will be greatly impacted.
(2) Commercial (ecological)
In terms of commercial development, the quantum computing industry may follow the path of classical computers.
When PCs came out in the late 1970s and early '80s, IBM and other companies were able to introduce new models and "small makeovers" every year, and this market dynamic drove the emergence of Moore's Law, which promoted the development of the PC field. Similarly, the field of quantum computing can not expect investors to invest regardless of return, only the introduction of "more useful" styles, to create "industrial-grade" or even "consumer-grade" application scenarios and applications, in order to iteratively update step by step, high-speed development.
At the application level, the current quantum computing industry has a broad space in the fields of optimization, chemical simulation, and finance.
Optimization field: Taking annealing algorithm as an example, DWave, one of the pioneers in the quantum computing industry, said that due to the phenomenon of quantum superposition, quantum annealing began with travelers occupying many coordinates at the same time. Quantum tunnels allow travelers to cross hills — rather than being forced to climb mountains — reducing the chances of being trapped in valleys that are not the global minimum. At the same time, quantum entanglement allows travelers to discover correlations between coordinates leading to deep valleys, further improving the results.
Chemical simulation field: As early as August 2020, Google implemented Hartree-Fock state chemistry simulation in a quantum processor, and then cooperated with BI to jointly study quantum computing drug research and development;
Finance: Quantum computing is expected to demonstrate extraordinary capabilities in data mining, machine learning, factor optimization, accelerated asset prediction, rapid arbitrage, and more. In February 2021, Origin Quantum reached a joint agreement with Jianxin Jinke to jointly release algorithm application exploration cases such as quantum option pricing and quantum risk value measurement.
However, at present, quantum computers have not yet shown a scene that can convince the majority of users to pay more than classical computer components such as CPUs, GPUs, and FPGAs. In the latest "Research Report on the Development and Application of Quantum Information Technology", the Chinese Academy of Information and Communications Technology also believes that the current quantum computing technology industry is still in the embryonic stage of development, and "killer" commercial products are still "a long way ahead":
"In general, the quantum computing technology industry is still in the embryonic stage of development, the current open quantum computing cloud platform at home and abroad mainly provides "toy-level" demonstration applications and services to demonstrate and verify the operation mechanism of quantum computing, as well as to provide quantum algorithms, quantum software initial operation and verification and other "tool-level" services, with the continuous development and improvement of quantum computing software and hardware in the future, "killer" and "industrial-grade" applications appear, the quantum computing cloud platform will gradually evolve to the "commercial level", of which the cloud platform is standardized 3. Service guarantee, security, etc. are still facing many challenges, and they still need to be jointly studied and discussed and continuously promoted by the industry. ”
It is worth mentioning that, similar to the 60s, the field of quantum computing has also received strong support from various governments and has received many government and military orders.
In addition, major companies in the cultivation of talents are also sparing no effort. Google, IBM, Huawei, Ali, Tencent, Baidu, Amazon and other giants have held various activities to provide a platform and competition for young scientists who are interested in quantum computing.
The soldiers and horses did not move, and the grain and grass went first. When the "killer" applications in the field of quantum computing really appear, who can seize the new heights of the computer industry? Let's applaud the scientists while we wait and see
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