Quantum Algorithm Development
Published by Engineering Employment · Sunday 22 Dec 2024 · 2:15
If tomorrow humanity (probably Google), successfully built a quantum computer, what could it do? The answer is, nothing useful because although it would be like having the engine of the Starship Enterprise you can’t just put that engine into a car / ship / aeroplane or even satellite and expect to hit warp 9!Remember when the electron was mysterious?
‘Wave particle duality’ and the random walk of an electron and the detailed application of ohms law are complexities or electrical circuits. Quantum computers are powered by a rather magical even smaller world of quantum mechanics. This area gets very confusing because sub atomic particles can become entangled then communicate with each other instantly without interaction across to our knowledge infinite distances, this makes computing theoretically much faster and efficient on it’s own. However on top of this we also have Superposition, a third state after off / zero and on / one. It’s much weirder than that though in quantum mechanics a quantum bit can only exist in it’s superposition state until it is measured. As soon as you look at it then it will revert to a zero or one.
Put another way electricity flows through an electric circuit where as in a quantum computer all the qubits stay still and process in secret, once the chain of events have completed we look at the result and in dong do reset them all.
So Quantum algorithm development thus far has been a bit backwards, instead of applying the power of what prototype quantum computers we have. Researchers have worked to identify problems that are suitable to be solved using quantum computers then developing the quantum algorithms to do it.
Some examples of Quantum Algorithms:
Grover's algorithm, Variational quantum Eigensolver, Shor's algorithm, Quantum Fourier transform etc.
Presently the Quantum computer is limited to a narrow range of applications which are mainly academic.
The next generation of quantum algorithms are likely to be a mathematical catalogue of functions that will form the building blocks of quantum coding, (like a software library) at this point developers should be able to apply the mathematics to whatever problem they choose.
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