After decades of hype, quantum computers are poised to prove their superiority over classical machines. Now the race is on to figure out what to do with them quantum artworkScott Garrett By
Michael Brooks REMEMBER when Apple launched the iPhone and you first heard people prattling on about things called apps? Back then, there were just a few hundred applications to choose from – a shortage that looked a lot like an opportunity and promptly gave rise to the newfangled job title of “app designer”. These days you can select from more than 2 million iPhone apps – yet more proof of the device’s runaway success. Consider now quantum computers, those much-vaunted dream machines that would use the strange laws of quantum physics to make light work of the very hardest problems. They have long been among the most frustrating of all the world-changing technologies we’ve been promised: perpetually just around the corner. But in the last year or so something has changed. The industry giants racing to build such a machine quietly started recruiting app designers, which suggests the long quest to make good on the hype about quantum computers might have entered a new stage. The fact that researchers at Google, IBM, Microsoft and a host of other organisations are even building prototypes shows how far we have come. What’s truly exciting, though, is that by challenging a new generation of programmers to go quantum, they are now tackling a question that has largely been brushed under the carpet: when we build the ultimate problem-solving machine, what are we going to do with it? The quantum leap in computing has been a long time coming. It was first conceived in the 1980s, when theorists predicted that a computer based on quantum effects could vastly outperform classical computers at certain tasks. The
https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg23631500-600-the-problem-with-the-ultimate-problemsolving-machine/?utm_campaign=Echobox&utm_medium=Social&utm_source=Facebook#link_time=1509624483
