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THE QUANTUM COMPUTING REVOLUTION : Unlocking Solutions to Humanity’s Toughest Problems (Part 1)
by Oliver Inderwildi
Quantum computing might sound like just another geeky buzzword — but in reality, it could be the most consequential technological breakthrough of all time. Far more than a faster classical computer, it operates on entirely different physical principles — ones that could crack problems today’s most powerful machines would take longer than the age of the universe to solve. This article explores how these extraordinary properties are tailor-made to tackle humanity’s most pressing challenges: from accelerating drug discovery to modelling climate systems and transforming clean energy.
This article is also available on my personal blog.
Introduction
“Why could quantum computers be so powerful and so disruptive?” I have been asked this questions, in many derivatives, via phone, email, social networks, messenger services and — believe it or not — text message. The reason for this flood of contacts was the recent breakthrough achieved with Google’s Willow and that was documented on Google’s blog & subsequently in the leading scientific journals Nature¹. Willow’s achievements include two groundbreaking milestones: exponentially reducing quantum errors that enable scaling of quantum computers (QCs) and a benchmark computation that broke records. Willow performed a computation in under five minutes that would take one of today’s fastest supercomputers 10…
