Category Archives: Quantum Computing

The early 2000s were not a good time for technology. After entering the new millennium amid the impotent panic of the Y2K bug, it wasnt long before the Dotcom Bubble was bursting all the hopes of a new internet-based era.

Fortunately the recovery was swift and within a few years brand new technologies were emerging that would transform culture, politicsand the economy.

They have brought with them new ways of connecting, consuming and getting around, while also raising fresh Doomsday concerns. As we enter a new decade of the 21st Century, weve rounded up the best and worst of the technologies that have taken us here, while offering some clue of where we might be going.

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There was nothing much really new about the iPhone: there had been phones before, there had been computers before, there had been phones combined into computers before. There was also a lot that wasnt good about it: it was slow, its internet connection barely functioned, and it would be two years before it could even take a video.

But as the foremost smartphone it heralded a revolution in the way people communicate, listen, watch and create. There has been no aspect of life that hasnt been changed by the technologies bundled up in the iPhone an ever-present and always-on internet connection, a camera that never leaves your side, a computer with mighty processing power that can be plucked out of your pocket.

Steve Jobs unveiled the first iPhone on 9 January, 2007 (Reuters)

The 2000s have, so far, been the era of mobile computers and social networking changing the shape of our cultural, political and social climate. All of those huge changes, for better or worse, are bound up in that tiny phone.AG

Though few people noticed, online social networks actually began at the end of the last century. The first was Six Degrees in 1997, which was named after the theory that everyone on the planet is separated by only six other people. It included features that became popular with subsequent iterations of the form, including profiles and friend lists, but it never really took off.

It wasnt until Friends Reunited and MySpace in the early 2000s that social networks achieved mainstream success, though even these seem insignificant when compared to Facebook.

Not only did Mark Zuckerbergs creation muscle its way to a monopoly in terms of social networks, it also swallowed up any nascent competitors in a space that came to be known as social media. First there was Instagram in 2012, for a modest $1 billion, and then came WhatsApp in 2014 for $19bn.

Between all of its apps, Facebook now reaches more than 2 billion people every day. It has come to define the way we communicate and heralded a new era of hyper-connectedness, while also profoundly shaping the internet as we know it. In doing so, Facebook has not only consigned the site Six Degrees to the history books, it has also re-written the theory itself cutting it down to just three-and-a-half degrees of separation. AC

At the start of this century, the complete reinvention of the entire economic system wasnt something many people were talking about. But then the 2007-08 financial crisis happened. As mortgages defaulted, companies collapsed, and governments bailed out the banks to the tune of trillions of dollars, people began to wonder if there might be a better way.

One person or group believed they had the answer. Satoshi Nakamotos true identity may still be a mystery, but their creation of a new electronic cash system called bitcoin in 2009 could have implications far beyond just currency. The underlying blockchain technology an immutable and unhackable online ledger could potentially transform everything from healthcare to real estate.

Bitcoin is yet to take off as a mainstream form of payment or transform the global economy like it might have promised, but we are barely a decade into the great cryptocurrency experiment. It has inspired thousands of imitators, including those currently being developed by Facebook and China, and it may be another 10 years before its true potential is finally realised. AC

Alright, so here we are, in front of the, er, elephants. And the cool thing about these guys is that they have really, really, really long trunks. And thats cool.

It may have been an inauspicious start, but these words would go on to fundamentally transform the way people consume media in the 21st century. It was 23 April, 2005, and Jawed Karim had just uploaded the first ever video to YouTube a video-sharing website he had helped create.

The YouTube channel homepage for Indian record label T-Series, which overtook controversial Swedish vlogger PewDiePie in 2019

AFP/Getty

PewDiePie has been the most popular YouTuber since 2013

PewDiePie / YouTube

5-Minute Crafts, which offers quick and quirky DIY tips to viewers, didn't even feature in the top 15 YouTube channels in July 2018

5-Minute Crafts

Brazilian music video producer and director KondZilla began his career after buying a camera with life insurance money left to him after his mother died when he was 18

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Sony Entertainment Televesion (SET) launched in 1995 and has recently seen huge growth of its Hindi-language YouTube channel

AFP/Getty

Canadian musician Justin Bieber held the number-two spot in 2018 before T-Series took over

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World Wrestling Entertainment has managed to gain a huge following on YouTube by sharing clips of fights and interviews with its stars

WWE

This YouTube channel specialises in 3D animation videos of nursery rhymes, as well as its own original songs. It is owned by the American firm Treasure Studio

Cocomelon

YouTube personalities Coby Cotton, Tyler Toney, Cody Jones, and Cory Cotton form Dude Perfect, a sports entertainment channel from the US

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YouTube personality German Garmendia is a Chilean comedian and writer

HolaSoyGerman

One of several musicians that populate the top 15 most popular YouTube channels, Ed Sheeran joined the list in 2017

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Music channel Badabun's subscriber count has not been publicly visible since 6 March 2019, at which point it had 37.2 million subscribers

Badabun / YouTube

US rapper Eminem first entered the list of the top 15 YouTube channels in 2013, the same year that PewDiePie took over

AFP/Getty

Brazilian Whindersson Nunes Batista joined YouTube in 2013 and became popular for his comedy videos

Whinderssonnunes / YouTube

US singer and actress Ariana Grande is the latest addition to the top 15 YouTube channels

AFP/Getty

The YouTube channel homepage for Indian record label T-Series, which overtook controversial Swedish vlogger PewDiePie in 2019

AFP/Getty

PewDiePie has been the most popular YouTuber since 2013

PewDiePie / YouTube

5-Minute Crafts, which offers quick and quirky DIY tips to viewers, didn't even feature in the top 15 YouTube channels in July 2018

5-Minute Crafts

Brazilian music video producer and director KondZilla began his career after buying a camera with life insurance money left to him after his mother died when he was 18

Getty

Sony Entertainment Televesion (SET) launched in 1995 and has recently seen huge growth of its Hindi-language YouTube channel

AFP/Getty

Canadian musician Justin Bieber held the number-two spot in 2018 before T-Series took over

Getty

World Wrestling Entertainment has managed to gain a huge following on YouTube by sharing clips of fights and interviews with its stars

WWE

This YouTube channel specialises in 3D animation videos of nursery rhymes, as well as its own original songs. It is owned by the American firm Treasure Studio

Cocomelon

YouTube personalities Coby Cotton, Tyler Toney, Cody Jones, and Cory Cotton form Dude Perfect, a sports entertainment channel from the US

Getty

YouTube personality German Garmendia is a Chilean comedian and writer

HolaSoyGerman

One of several musicians that populate the top 15 most popular YouTube channels, Ed Sheeran joined the list in 2017

Getty

Music channel Badabun's subscriber count has not been publicly visible since 6 March 2019, at which point it had 37.2 million subscribers

Badabun / YouTube

US rapper Eminem first entered the list of the top 15 YouTube channels in 2013, the same year that PewDiePie took over

AFP/Getty

Brazilian Whindersson Nunes Batista joined YouTube in 2013 and became popular for his comedy videos

Whinderssonnunes / YouTube

US singer and actress Ariana Grande is the latest addition to the top 15 YouTube channels

AFP/Getty

Just over a year later, Google bought the site for $1.65 billion and the fortunes of Karim, his co-founders, and countless future content creators were changed forever.

There are now hundreds of hours of video published to YouTube every minute and it all started with that 18-second clip at the zoo. AC

Arthur C Clarke famously quipped that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. But there is surely nothing more like magic and no magic more powerful than the fact that the 21st century has brought the ability to instantly connect to information and people at the other side of the world.

First, at the beginning of the century, came 3G, and then 10 years or so later came 4G. Every decade of this century has been marked by new advances in the speed and reliability of mobile data connections.

And those mobile data connections have helped re-write the world that relies on them. Just about every other major breakthrough in technology that came through the 2000s social media, instant photo sharing, citizen journalism and everything else relied on having data connections everywhere.

5G which has ostensibly already rolled out, but is yet to make its full impact is likely to be similarly transformative through the decade to come, if its evangelists are to be believed.

Debates have raged about whether this constant connectivity and the distractions and dangers it has brought has really driven us apart. But that too is surely testament to its power. AG

Many of technologys biggest developments in the 2000s havent really been about technology at all: piracy and then streaming changed how we make and consume culture entirely, social media has turned politics on his head. Nowhere is that more clear than in the gig economy and the apps and websites like Uber, Deliveroo and Airbnb that power it, which claim to be tech businesses but are really new ways of buying and selling labour.

The real revolution of the gig economy was not the technology that powers these apps: there is little difference between calling for a cab and summoning an Uber, really. Nor was it what the companies like to suggest, that they have opened up a new and inspiring way of working that allows anyone to clock on whenever they log on.

Instead, it was the beginning of a process of changing the way that people work and relate to those who fulfil services for them. It is likely that we have not seen the end of the kinds of profound changes that these companies have made to working conditions or the ways that those workers have fought back. AG

Virtual reality has been the future before: ever since the first stereoscopes, people have been excited about the possibility of disappearing into other worlds that appear before their eyes. But it has never quite arrived.

But in the more recent years of the 2000s it started to look a bit more meaningful. Virtual reality headsets have been pushed out by many of the worlds biggest companies, and consumer computers are finally powerful enough to generate believable worlds that people are happy to spend their time in.

In recent years, much of the focus has turned to augmented reality rather than virtual reality. That technology allows information to be overlaid on top of the real world, rather than putting people into an entirely virtual world. If it comes off if it is not confined to failed experiments like Google Glass then it could change the way we interact with the world, potentially giving us information all of the time and could even do away with things like smartphones as our primary way of connecting with technology. AG

Quantum computing has not really happened yet. A few months ago, researchers announced that they had achieved quantum supremacy by doing an operation that would not be possible on a traditional computer but it was a largely useless, very specific, operation, which didnt really change anything in itself.

Already, however, the promise and the threat of quantum computing is changing the world. It looks set to upend all of our assumptions about computers, allowing them to be unimaginably fast and do work never thought possible. It could unlock new kinds of health research and scientific understanding; it could also literally unlock encryption, which currently relies on impossible calculations that could quickly become very possible with quantum computers.

A new era of computing could bring about a 'quantum apocalypse' (iStock)

It isnt clear when it will arrive, of course; like other potentially revolutionary technologies, it could take a very long time or never arrive at all. But it is sitting there in the future, ready to turn everything on its head and, as researchers rush to understand it, it is already changing the world. AG

No vision of the future would be complete without the ability to speak to and control your home. And now it seems like we are finally living in it.

Through the 2000s, just about everything came to be hooked up to the internet: you could buy smart kettles, internet-enabled doorbells, and a video camera for every room in your house. And to control them came microphones and speakers that you put in your house and could talk to.

But as the smart home and the voice assistants that power it have soared in popularity, they have been beset by concerns, too. Is giving over control of your home to internet-enabled devices safe, when those devices can break down or be seized by hackers? Should we be allowing internet giants like Amazon and Google to put microphones in our home? As we enter the new decade, it looks like our homes are set to be defined not by the capabilities the technology in our homes give us but who we want to have power over them. AG

Before there was Spotify, there was Napster, and before people were watching movies on Netflix, they were downloading them through PirateBay. Piracy has been one step ahead of legal ways to consume media but in doing so it has led the way for new platforms that now dominate our online lives.

Streaming has not only changed the way we listen to music and watch films, it has also given rise to new ways to create content. Live streaming video games on Twitch is one of the fastest growing mediums, while live video broadcasts through Facebook, Twitter and YouTube give people instant access to everything from street protests to rocket launches.

The Pirate Bay's latest venture into streaming comes despite battling takedown attempts by authorities for more than a decade (Reuters)

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The 20 technologies that defined the first 20 years of the 21st Century - The Independent

Facial reconstruction of A. anamensis by John Gurche using 38-lakh-year-old (3.8-million-year-ago) hominin cranium.

From discovering cures for life-threatening diseases to exploring outer space, from unearthing new facts about human history to making incredible strides in artificial intelligence, humanity achieved exceptional breakthroughs in the field of science and technology in 2019.

As the year comes to an end, it is time to look back at some of those glorious scientific revolutions that will shape our future. Here are our picks for the most significant scientific advancements of 2019:

5. Hello Sun? Earthlings are going beyond your influence!

A simulated landing process of Chang'e-4 lunar probe at the Beijing Aerospace Control Center on Jan. 3, 2019.

Launched in January 2006, the interplanetary space probe New Horizons from the US space agency NASA steered past the Kuiper Belt object 486958 Arrokoth (then nicknamed Ultima Thule) on January 1, 2019. The Kuiper Belt is the region beyond the known planetary system of solar system, and this was the farthest flyby ever conducted by any human-made spacecraft.

Also this year, on November 4, NASA's Voyager 2 reached the interstellar mediuma space between star systems, well beyond the influence of our solar system. Voyager 1 had earlier achieved this feat in 2012. Voyager 2, its successor, was launched in the year 1977.

Also, China's moon mission, Chang'e 4, successfully made a soft landing on the far side of the Moonbecoming the first ever mission to do so. Named after the Chinese moon goddess, the mission is attempting to determine the age and composition of the Moon's unexplored region.

4. Quantum leap in computing

Representational image

Of all the progress made in computing research in 2019, the biggest breakthrough was perhaps the realisation of quantum computing.

Right in the first month of 2019, technology giant IBM unveiled Q System Onethe first quantum computer outside a research labbringing a rather abstract concept into the public imagination. Unlike the bits of information in computers we use, a quantum computer uses quantum bits, or qubits, enabling an exponential rise in the amount of data it can process and store.

Also Read: Rewind 2019: A Look Back at Significant Developments in Indian Science This Year

Further, a team of researchers from Australia and Singapore developed a quantum-powered machine that can accurately simulate future outcomes arising from different set of alternatives. Meanwhile, another study at Yale University showed that we can catch a qubit between the quantum jump and alter its outcomes. This was an exponential jump in fine-tuning the quantum systems as the outcomes need not be completely random and abrupt.

While other research also helped in conceptualising quantum drives with immense storage capacity, the biggest news was from Google. The search giant confirmed in October that it had achieved quantum supremacy. To put things in perspective, researchers at Google claim that the quantum computer solved in three minutes a problem that would have taken 10,000 years even for a supercomputer.

3. Revolutionary research in medical science

Representational image

Medical researchers are always striving to push the envelope of human resilience and efficiency. The year 2019 saw progress on both these fronts, with the development of potential cures for multiple life-threatening diseases and gene-editing promising to be more effective than ever.

This year, twin drugs were developed for Ebola and were found to be effective in nearly 90% of the cases, making the seemingly incurable condition treatable. Researchers also discovered potential cures for bubble boy disease, a condition where babies are born without disease-fighting immune cells, for cystic fibrosis, a painful, debilitating lung disease, as well as for pancreatic cancer.

Moreover, after decades, HIV research finally yielded some fruitful results this year with patients positively responding to treatments. After a long gap of 12 years from the day the first patient was cured of HIV infection that causes AIDS, another patient was cured in March 2019. Researchers had been relentlessly trying to replicate the treatment that cured the infection for the first time in 2007.

Furthermore, using CRISPR gene-editing technology, scientists have found potential treatments for cancer patients, even those with whom the standard procedure was not successful. In October, researchers produced scientific evidence that new gene-editing technology has the potential to correct up to 89% of genetic defects like sickle cell anaemia.

2. Imaging the faraway invisible wonder

Image of the black hole at the center of galaxy M87

Named the top scientific breakthrough of 2019 by the journal Science, this incredible photograph of a black hole was taken using eight radio telescopes around the world to form a virtual instrument that is said to be the size of the Earth itself.

The first-ever image of a black hole, released on April 10 this year, was taken by the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) collaboration team. The gravity of a black hole is so strong that even light cannot escape its pull, and to capture an image of something that does not emit light is no easy task.

EHT imaged the silhouette (or shadow) of a massive black hole called M87 which is located at the centre of a galaxy 55 million light-years from Earth. M87 has enormous masswhopping 6500 million times the mass of the Sun. The image shows a ring of light coming from the gas falling into the event horizon (the boundary from beyond which nothing can escape) of the black hole.

1. Retracing the origins of humans

Craniofacial reconstruction process of Rakhigarhi cemetery individuals (BR02 and BR36).

Humankinds fascination with the question 'Where did we come from?' has persisted over centuries. Yet, some of the biggest breakthroughs in answering this question were made this year, starting with the discovery of a previously-unknown species of ancient humans. Named Homo luzonensis, this small-bodied bipedal species was discovered in the Philippines and is said to have lived on the island of Luzon 50,000 to 67,000 years ago.

In May, researchers deciphered a four-decade old mystery by identifying a 160,000-year-old human jawbone found in the Tibetian Plateau nearly 40 years ago. The fossil was of Denisovan, an enigmatic ancestor species of humans who ranged across Asia until some 50,000 years ago. The discoverymade despite the absence of DNA in the jawhelped scientists understand this species better. In September, another group of researchers further refined the picture of Denisovans whose traces still linger in the DNA of a few modern humans.

In August, descriptions of a nearly 38-lakh-year-old remains of a skull belonging to a bipedal ancestor of humans baffled the world. This skull proved that two of our ancestor speciesA. anamensis and A. afarensismay have overlapped for at least 100,000 years. This evidence of the existence of these two of our ancestor species at a similar timescale busts the long-held belief that human evolution follows a single lineage, i.e. one species coming after the other.

In a first-of-its-kind attempt, scientists have generated an accurate facial representation of people from the Indus Valley Civilisation in October. Nnother important study showed that the ancestral homeland of every human alive today traces back to a region south of the Zambezi River in northern Botswana. Building on the previous genetic evolution studies, the researchers used ethnolinguistic and geographic frequency distribution data from the genomes of over 1000 southern Africans to trace back the origin of modern humans.

Exponential growth continues

India has also contributed immensely in all scientific domains over the past few years and is now only behind China and the US in terms of the number of published research studies. Building exponentially on the success of previous decades, scientists around the world have made immense contributions from improving our daily life to understanding the mysteries of the universe.

With so much exciting research pouring in from all corners of the world, it isn't easy to even keep track of the incredible pace at which science is progressing. While we have tried to cover a few iconic annual scientific highlights in this article, there are thousands of other important discoveries, studies and achievements that shaped science in 2019.

And as yet another potential-filled year dawns on our planet, The Weather Channel India will keep you tuned in about all the exciting news, updates and breakthroughs from the world of science.

So for your daily dose of weather, environment, space and science stories, stay tuned to weather.com and stay curious!

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Top 5: Scientific Breakthroughs That Made 2019 an Unforgettable Year of Human Progress - The Weather Channel

The majority of cybersecurity professionals believe quantum computing will develop faster than other security technologies, but for them thats cause for concern.

According to a new report by the Neustar International Security Council (NISC), almost three quarters (74 per cent) are keeping a close eye on the tech, while 21 per cent are doing experiments of their own. To tackle the potential coming crisis, a third (35 per cent) are already developing a quantum strategy, while just 16 per cent arent yet thinking about it.

The vast majority believe quantum computing could become a problem for encryption within five years. Just seven per cent believe quantum supremacy will never happen.

At the same time, almost all CISOs, CSO, CTOs and other security directors are feeling excitement over the potential positive changes quantum computing may bring.

At the moment, we rely on encryption, which is possible to crack in theory, but impossible to crack in practice, precisely because it would take so long to do so, over timescales of trillions or even quadrillions of years, said Rodney Joffe, Chairman of NISC and Security CTO at Neustar.

Without the protective shield of encryption, a quantum computer in the hands of a malicious actor could launch a cyberattack unlike anything weve ever seen.

According to Joffe, the cybersecurity community is already hard at work, researching quantum-proof cryptography.

IT experts of every stripe will need to work to rebuild the algorithms, strategies, and systems that form our approach to cybersecurity, Joffe concluded.

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Quantum computing could be the next big security breakthrough - ITProPortal

A close-up view of the IBM Q quantum computer. The processor is in the silver-colored cylinder.

Quantum computers are getting a lot more real. No, you won't be playing Call of Duty on one anytime soon. But Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Rigetti Computing and IBM all made important advances in 2019 that could help bring computers governed by the weird laws of atomic-scale physics into your life in other ways.

Google's declaration of quantum supremacywas the most headline-grabbing moment in the field. The achievement -- more limited than the grand term might suggest -- demonstrated that quantum computers could someday tackle computing problems beyond the reach of conventional "classical" computers.

Proving quantum computing progress is crucial. We're still several breakthroughs away from realizing the full vision of quantum computing. Qubits, the tiny stores of data that quantum computers use, need to be improved. So do the finicky control systems used to program and read quantum computer results. Still, today's results help justify tomorrow's research funding to sustain the technology when the flashes of hype inevitably fizzle.

Now playing: Watch this: Quantum computing is the new super supercomputer

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Quantum computers will live in data centers, not on your desk, when they're commercialized. They'll still be able to improve many aspects of your life, though. Money in your retirement account might grow a little faster and your packages might be delivered a little sooner as quantum computers find new ways to optimize businesses. Your electric-car battery might be a little lighter and new drugs might help you live a little longer after quantum computers unlock new molecular-level designs. Traffic may be a little lighter from better simulations.

But Google's quantum supremacy step was just one of many needed to fulfill quantum computing's promise.

"We're going to get there in cycles. We're going to have a lot of dark ages in which nothing happens for a long time," said Forrester analyst Brian Hopkins. "One day that new thing will really change the world."

Among the developments in 2019:

Classical computers, which include everything from today's smartwatches to supercomputers that occupy entire buildings, store data as bits that represent either a 1 or a 0. Quantum computers use a different approach called qubits that can represent a combination of 1 and 0 through an idea called superposition.

Ford and Microsoft adapted a quantum computing traffic simulation to run on a classical computer. The result: a traffic routing algorithm that could cut Seattle traffic congestion by 73%.

The states of multiple qubits can be linked, letting quantum computers explore lots of possible solutions to a problem at once. With each new qubit added, a quantum computer can explore double the number of possible solutions, an exponential increase not possible with classical machines.

Quantum computers, however, are finicky. It's hard to get qubits to remain stable long enough to return useful results. The act of communicating with qubits can perturb them. Engineers hope to add error correction techniques so quantum computers can tackle a much broader range of problems.

Plenty of people are quantum computing skeptics. Even some fans of the technology acknowledge we're years away from high-powered quantum computers. But already, quantum computing is a real business. Samsung, Daimler, Honda, JP Morgan Chase and Barclays are all quantum computing customers. Spending on quantum computers should reach hundreds of millions of dollars in the 2020s, and tens of billions in the 2030s, according to forecasts by Deloitte, a consultancy. China, Europe, the United States and Japan have sunk billions of dollars into investment plans. Ford and Microsoft say traffic simulation technology for quantum computers, adapted to run on classical machines, already is showing utility.

Right now quantum computers are used mostly in research. But applications with mainstream results are likely coming. The power of quantum computers is expected to allow for the creation of new materials, chemical processes and medicines by giving insight into the physics of molecules. Quantum computers will also help for greater optimization of financial investments, delivery routes and flights by crunching the numbers in situations with a large number of possible courses of action.

They'll also be used for cracking today's encryption, an idea spy agencies love, even if you might be concerned about losing your privacy or some snoop getting your password. New cryptography adapted for a quantum computing future is already underway.

Another promising application is artificial intelligence, though that may be years in the future.

"Eventually we'll be able to reinvent machine learning," Forrester's Hopkinssaid. But it'll take years of steady work in quantum computing beyond the progress of 2019. "The transformative benefits are real and big, but they are still more sci-fi and theory than they are reality."

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Quantum computing leaps ahead in 2019 with new power and speed - CNET

When asked what invention will be as revolutionary in the 2020s as smartphones were in the 2010s, Bank of America strategist Haim Isreal said, without hesitation, quantum computing.

At the banks annual year ahead event last week in New York, Israel qualified his prediction, arguing in an interview with MarketWatch that the timing of the smartphones arrival on the scene in the mid-2000s, and its massive impact on the American business landscape in the 2010s, doesnt line up neatly with quantum-computing breakthroughs, which are only now being seen, just a few weeks before the start of the 2020s.

The iPhone already debuted in 2007, enabling its real impact to be felt in the 2010s, he said, while the first business applications for quantum computing won't be seen till toward the end of the coming decade.

But, Israel argued, when all is said and done, quantum computing could be an even more radical technology in terms of its impact on businesses than the smartphone has been. This is going to be a revolution, he said.

Quantum computing is a nascent technology based on quantum theory in physics which explains the behavior of particles at the subatomic level, and states that until observed these particles can exist in different places at the same time. While normal computers store information in ones and zeros, quantum computers are not limited by the binary nature of current data processing and so can provide exponentially more computing power.

Quantum things can be in multiple places at the same time, said Chris Monroe, a University of Maryland physicist and founder of IonQ told the Associated Press . The rules are very simple, theyre just confounding.

In October, Alphabet Inc. GOOG, -0.18% subsidiary Google claimed to have achieved a breakthrough by using a quantum computer to complete a calculation in 200 seconds on a 53-qubit quantum computing chip, a task it calculated would take the fastest current super-computer 10,000 years. Earlier this month, Amazon.com Inc. AMZN, +0.03% announced its intention to collaborate with experts to develop quantum computing technologies that can be used in conjunction with its cloud computing services. International Business Machines Corp. IBM, -0.82% and Microsoft Corp. MSFT, +0.84% are also developing quantum computing technology.

Israel argued these tools will revolutionize several industries, including health care, the internet of things and cyber security. He said that pharmaceutical companies are most likely to be the first commercial users of these devices, given the explosion of data created by health care research.

Pharma companies are right now subject to Moores law in reverse, he said. They are seeing the cost of drug development doubling every nine years, as the amount of data on the human body becomes ever more onerous to process. Data on genomics doubles every 50 days, he added, arguing that only quantum computers will be able to solve the pharmaceutical industrys big-data problem.

Quantum computing will also have a major impact on cybersecurity, an issue that effects nearly every major corporation today. Currently cyber security relies on cryptographic algorithms, but quantum computings ability to solve these equations in the fraction of the time a normal computer does will render current cyber security methods obsolete.

In the future, even robust cryptographic algorithms will be substantially weakened by quantum computing, while others will no longer be secure at all, according to Swaroop Sham, senior product marketing manager at Okta.

For investors, Israel said, it is key to realize that the first one or two companies to develop commercially applicable quantum-computing will be richly rewarded with access to untold amounts of data and that will only make their software services more valuable to potential customers in a virtuous circle.

What weve learned this decade is that whoever controls the data will win big time, he said.

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Quantum computing will be the smartphone of the 2020s, says Bank of America strategist - MarketWatch

The technology has helped to improve congestion by 73 per cent in scenario-testing

Ford and Microsoft are using quantum-inspired computing technology to reduce traffic congestion. Through a joint research pilot, scientists have used the technology to simulate thousands of vehicles and their impact on congestion in the US city of Seattle.

Ford said it is still early in the project but encouraging progress has been made and it is further expanding its partnership with the tech giant.

The companies teamed up in 2018 to develop new quantum approaches running on classical computers already available to help reduce Seattles traffic congestion.

Writing on a blog post on Medium.com, Dr Ken Washington, chief technology officer, Ford Motor Company, explained that during rush hour, numerous drivers request the shortest possible routes at the same time, but current navigation services handle these requests "in a vacuum": They do not take into consideration the number of similar incoming requests, including areas where other drivers are all planning to share the same route segments, when delivering results.

What is required is a more balanced routing system that could manage all the various route requests from drivers and provide optimised route suggestions, reducing the number of vehicles on a particular road.

These and more are all variables well need to test for to ensure balanced routing can truly deliver tangible improvements for cities.

Traditional computers dont have the computational power to do this but, as Washington explained, in a quantum computer, information is processed by a quantum bit (or a qubit) and can simultaneously exist "in two different states" before it gets measured.

This ultimately enables a quantum computer to process information with a faster speed, he wrote. Attempts to simulate some specific features of a quantum computer on non-quantum hardware have led to quantum-inspired technology powerful algorithms that mimic certain quantum behaviours and run on specialised conventional hardware. That enables organisations to start realising some benefits before fully scaled quantum hardware becomes available."

Working with Microsoft, Ford tested several different possibilities, including a scenario involving as many as 5,000 vehicles each with 10 different route choices available to them simultaneously requesting routes across Metro Seattle. It reports that in 20 seconds, balanced routing suggestions were delivered to the vehicles that resulted in a 73 per cent improvement in total congestion when compared to selfish routing.

The average commute time, meanwhile, was also cut by eight per cent representing an annual reduction of more than 55,000 hours across this simulated fleet.

Based on these results, Ford is expanding its partnership with Microsoft to further improve the algorithm and understand its effectiveness in more real-world scenarios.

For example, will this method still deliver similar results when some streets are known to be closed, if route options arent equal for all drivers, or if some drivers decide to not follow suggested routes? wrote Washington. These and more are all variables well need to test for to ensure balanced routing can truly deliver tangible improvements for cities.

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Could quantum computing be the key to cracking congestion? - SmartCitiesWorld