Yet another wave will be impacting information technology (IT) globally. It is called quantum computing (QC). The good news is that IT managers do not need to do anything for another 3–5 years. However, they should now start thinking differently about QC, especially if they are part of an analytics-driven corporation. The goal of this article is to answer these questions:
Be prepared to think differently — very differently — about how QC works. It feels like watching an old Twilight Zone episode on the black/white TV.
After a century of upheaval in theoretical physics, scientists now conclude that quantum mechanics is more ‘natural’ than classical Newtonian physics. Fortunately for our sanity, quantum mechanics lives within its own world, which deals with the very very very small. However, being small does not imply being insignificant. Everything humans know, from finger movements on a keyboard to formation of galaxies, owes its existence to the basic properties of quantum mechanics. It is the foundation for reality as we sense it, although this foundation is beyond our intuition.
Why is QC weirdly important to an IT manager? The answer usually invokes a deep explanation of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, entanglement, superposition, coherence, and the like. If one has the time, take a semester graduate course on quantum mechanics. [2] If short on the time, then read the cheat-sheet as follows.
To simplify, the key concept for an IT manager is the qubit, which is like the bits and bytes in classical computers. However, these qubits possess weird super-powers.
Since May 2016, the IBM Quantum Experience has offered a 5-qubit system for experimentation, with which dozens of researchers and students have availed themselves. [3] Like the early computers of the 1950’s, this system cannot support practical applications since 5-bits can represent only ONE of 32 unique states. Unlike classical computers, 5-qubits can represent ALL of the 32 states simultaneously, according to an underlying probabilistic wave function …whatever that is! To simply, consider the following analogy.
Fifty persons are asked to flip coins in the air. They are pack tightly into the room and given a special coin that is numbered and unfairly bias toward either heads or tails. On 1–2–3, everyone flips their coin into the air, letting them fall on the floor. Results are tabulated for each coin.
For a moment, the spinning of all 50 coins are affected by all other coins via air currents or collisions. This is like QC entanglement. While the coins are spinning, it makes little sense to ask whether a certain coin is heads or tails. This is like QC uncertainty. Further, the coins are spinning so fast that its state is not heads or tails but a blending of heads and tails. This is like QC superposition. Finally, when the coins hit the floor, the entanglement suddenly ceases. This is like losing QC coherence, which is a critical design issue for QC.
As with all analogies, the mass coin toss is not true to the real situation. Here is where the weirdness starts…
In the coin toss, two coins may interact. However, two coins represent only one of 4 states (00, 01, 10, 11) while spinning. Likewise, 3 coins represent ONE of 8 states, 4 coins represent ONE of 16 states, and so on. In contrast, 3 qubits represent ALL of the 8 states simultaneously because of superposition. The point is: The n-coin system represents n bits of information, while the n-qubit system represents 2^n (2to the nth power) bits of information. At first when n is small, there is little difference between the two systems. However, as n becomes large, the n-qubit system becomes exponentially more powerful to represent an ever-increasing complexity.
The situation gets weirder… If they are entangled, qubits can react to changes in other qubits instantaneously regardless of their distance apart.
