Thinking Through Quantum
Quantum has a lot of hype, as all new technologies with large promises do. Some of this hype is because the idea of quantum mechanics is so romantic. It moves us a little bit closer to a more accurate model of reality. Rather than the binary state of bits in classical computing (similar to heads and tails of a coin), quantum computing rests upon qubits (comparable to an ever-spinning coin, as the qubit exists in a ‘superposition’ of both states at once). Quantum superposition represents the complexity of the universe in a way that binaries never really have. But it’s also incredibly hard to know, across many different areas of research, what approaches will succeed.
Quantum mechanics has been pitched as holding promise for a lot of industries especially hardware and software for computing, as well as sensing and metrology. I decided to try and work through what is valuable here between now and the next five years, and hopefully this will be a good baseline for people to understand what we at Compound are digging into across quantum hardware, software, and sensing fields and what we find promising in each.
“While the state of a classical computer is determined by the binary values of a collection of bits, at any single point in time the state of a quantum computer with the same number of quantum bits can span all possible states of the corresponding classical computer, and thus works in an exponentially larger problem space.” – Quantum Computing: Prospects & Progress, AAAS
