Quantum computing. What is it, current situation and future prospects
Quantum computing is different from computing classical paradigm computing. The main novelty is the use of qubits, which can have the state 1 and 0 at the same time. Compared to classical computing bits, which can only take one of the values in each moment.
This exponentially increases the computational capacity, since much less qubits are required to represent and / or process the information.
In classical computing, to double the computing power it is necessary to double the number of the processors’ transistors. In Quantum Computing, to double the calculation capacity, it is enough to add 1 single qubit, which places us before a scenario of exponential growth.
QUBITS |
EQUIVALENT ADDITIONAL BITS |
2 |
512 bits |
3 |
1.024 bits |
10 |
15 kilobytes |
16 |
1 megabyte |
20 |
17 megabytes |
30 |
17 gigabytes |
35 |
500 gigabytes |
100 |
More bytes than atoms on Earth |
280 |
More bytes than atoms in the Universe |
And the time to solve exponential problems is significantly reduced:
SCALE TYPE |
RESOLUTION TIME |
||
Classical computing |
330 years |
3300 years |
Age of the universe |
Quantum computing |
10 minutes |
11 minutes |
24 minutes approx |