Quantum Computing:  Harnessing Nature’s Most Mystifying Phenomena

My time as a “quantum coder“.

May 2012 – August 2012
Institute for Quantum Computing,
Waterloo, Canada
Position: Research Intern

I’ve programmed a quantum computer. That statement likely leaves a lot of people scratching their heads. You may have heard of tech giants such as Google and Intel recently entering the quantum computing space. But what are quantum computers anyway, and what’s all the buzz about?

The conventional computers we use today are essentially a vast collection of electrical switches that can assume the binary states 1 or 0 (like “on” and “off”). Hence all information on a computer is stored as a sequence of 1‘s or 0‘s, with eight such switches (“bits”) required to encode one “byte” of data.

Quantum computers, on the other hand, employ an exotic type of switch called a “qubit” (short for quantum bit), which can represent not only either a 1 or a 0, but any weighted combination of these two states (called a superposition). This allows a relatively small number of quantum bits to store enormous amounts of data. An estimated 60 qubits would be enough to encode the equivalent of all the data produced by humanity in 2017.

Together with another quantum feature called entanglement, in which the state of one qubit can be entwined with the state of another, quantum computers could potentially provide massive parallelism in data handling and data manipulation for certain computational tasks. This seems timely given that the amount of data we generate (2.5 quintillion bytes per day in 2017) is increasing exponentially as networked electronics and data-harnessing technologies such as artificial intelligence become increasingly more pervasive.

As an Intern at the Institute for Quantum Computing, I worked on one of Canada’s first entanglement-compatible superconducting quantum processors, and was tasked with putting together hardware and software for controlling its quantum bits and carrying out experiments on them.

This is no straightforward task, as it requires a deep understanding of the highly complex physics and mathematics behind controlling quantum systems, which must be built into the procedures implemented by the code and the way the hardware is configured.

While practical ‘universal’ quantum computers are still decades away, a Canadian company called D-Wave is already exploiting qubits to solve specialized problems in the area of optimization (i.e. minimizing a cost function), with customers today including Google and Lockeed-Martin. Their brilliant insight was to focus on an ‘analog’ rather than ‘digital’ version of a quantum computer, and a specific computational task where the natural tendencies of quantum systems to prefer or seek the ground state is a benefit rather than an impediment.

Toronto’s Creative Destruction Lab (which has quickly earned a reputation as the best seed-stage startup program in Canada) recently initiated a Quantum Machine Learning stream, to combine emerging quantum computing platforms with the exciting field of artificial intelligence. It will be thrilling to see what developments unfold over the next several years.

The future of quantum computing remains uncertain, but nonetheless it continues to represent one of the foremost achievements in humanity’s ability to understand and engineer nature at its most fundamental levels.