It’s time to stop thinking CLASSICALLY and to start thinking quantumly!

Niels Bohr, a Danish physicist and one of the first researchers in the field of quantum physics, said that anyone who is not shocked by quantum theory means that he has not understood it.

We are facing a new era of humanity, not even comparable to the advent of the internet in our lives a few decades ago or electricity two centuries ago.

Until today we have all reasoned "against nature", representing a natural world around us made up of infinite colors, infinite conditions and infinite possible states .... in only two conditions: black or white, true or false, on or off, 0 or 1.

More because of our self-limitation of thought than because of advances in science, since the twentieth century we have created computers based on an architecture that distinguishes only two possible states, 0 and 1.

The foundational logic of binary type has remained the same even if computer science has made great strides, up to today's supercomputers.

From huge water-cooled machines which were large entire rooms, to the smartphones we hold in the palm of our hand: computers have shrunk and become more powerful every year according to Moore's Law (the density of transistors on a microchip and its computing speed doubles every 18 months).

But they have already reached limits: both "physical" in terms of the miniaturization of components, and in terms of the amount of data they can process in a reasonable time.

And even if they work in parallel and in a distributed way in a network which enhances the total computing capacity, they cannot overcome the limits of the architecture itself, with which they are all built, from the first to the last: all current computers are based on the Von Neumann model of 1945.

They understand only two values: 0 and 1.

We have reached the limits.

Many problems we have today are not even representable by computers or solvable in less than a thousand years.

Current computers cannot deal with the problem of climate change, complex weather calculations, financial simulations on markets with high volatility, optimizations of diversified portfolios with exponential complexity compared to traditional trading portfolios, optimizations of logistics/supply chain on a global scale.

Simulations, especially in the mathematical, economic and financial fields, are limited to the capabilities achieved by computers, which can no longer be increased.

Today's computers cannot even represent 1 molecule of coffee (you need 2^48 bits, that is a number 48 digits long!).

There are calculations that would take too long and would be too expensive, so you don't even try to do.

But the future that awaits us will no longer be limited to the choice between 0 and 1.

From 2030, in a very short time, we will all think differently. In a quantum way.

The quantum computer, theorized by Feynman in 1982, has existed for over 20 years. But only since 2019, after decades of prototyping and solving problems related to reliability, can we see it operational.

The basic computing elements of quantum computers are expressed in qbits.

We started from 7 qubits in 2001, then 16 in 2007, 128 in 2011, 433 in 2023.

By the end of this year IBM will exceed 1000 qubits, a historic milestone for quantum computing and a driving force for investments in this sector, already enormous thanks to thousands of companies involved, including Microsoft, Amazon, Google.

30 billion dollars, to reach 125 billion in 2030, considered the “disruption year" (Y2Q).

The race to quantum computing has already begun, and those who have not started running are already late.

But what's so special?

A quantum computer is exponentially faster than a classical computer. In 2019 the researcher Ewin Tang showed that an algorithm that on a classical computer would have taken 2740 years to give a result, on a quantum computer would have taken 6 days.

There are now dozens of concrete examples of the use of quantum computers in the optimization of computing times: large companies have reduced data processing times from 25 hours of weekly calculations to 2 minutes.

And today we have "only" 433 qubits: Google and Microsoft have announced that they want to reach 1,000,000 qubits within 10 years.

This incredible level of power and reliability of quantum computers opens the possibility for enormous advances in our society: from the discovery of new materials, new molecules, new safer drugs, predictive simulations of catastrophic events.

Fascinating improvements in the field of chemistry, biology, pharmaceuticals, genomics, physics, finance, computer science. But above all we will be able to deal with problems that we have never been able to even represent with classical computers.

The magic of the qubit.

Today's computers think about 0s and 1s. A bit, the minimum unit of processing, can only take these two values, nothing else.

1 byte, consisting of 8 bits, can therefore take 256 values.

The quantum bit, called qubit, can take several values simultaneously, not just 0 and 1.

1 byte, consisting of 8 qbits, can have 256 values at the same time! That's why quantum computers are so fast, it's a different architecture to be able to perform complex calculations, in a very short time.

To better understand, the bit is one-dimensional and can take only two values. The qubit is represented on a Bloch sphere, that is, on a three-dimensional vector space that can take infinite values. This is great! The difference between classical computation and quantum computation is the overlapping of states: byte equals one of 256 different possibilities per clock cycle, Q byte is all 256 possibilities instantaneously.

Here a picture to represent this big difference.

Here you can see all the “concurrent” possible positions:

The qubit has these advantages:

- The principle of superposition of states (two or more states can be added resulting in another valid state)... that is, the same quantum state can have multiple values.

- The phenomenon of quantum correlation (entanglement), means that multiple values can be taken at the same time, even at a physical distance.

Remember: from just two distinct individual values, we go to infinite values at once, regardless of distance.

This property is called teleportation, which as a term sounds very science fiction, but which opens up new possibilities on the preservation of quantum data regardless of distance.... This is another fascinating novelty.

To conclude, these are the foundations of quantum computing, which will change our lives forever. And the beauty is that all this is already underway.

The question is not if it will happen, but when.

And times are getting faster, just a few years.

Right now?

Were you shocked?

Just think CLASSIC. It's time to think QUANTUM!

Join the Kyndryl Quantum Team.

Today, tomorrow is too late.