Chad Rigetti near one of his quantum computers.
Any company looking to get in on the ground floor of quantum computing should ask itself three questions, advises Chad Rigetti, CEO of Rigetti Computing, which is building the first cloud service powered by quantum computing.
“Does your organization use advanced computing?”
“Do you know what your unmet computing needs are?”
“If you could meet those computing needs, would it grow your top line revenue?”
“If the answer to three of those questions is yes, then the time to start thinking about doing something in quantum is now,” Rigetti concluded Monday at the Forbes CIO Summit in Half Moon Bay, California.
Such triple-yes companies will boost the quantum computing industry’s worth to $45 billion by 2022, Deloitte Insights predicts, as industries scramble for the high-performance abilities this nascent technology promises. Yet it may be decades before the commercial potential is realized. How quantum computers may boost your company’s bottom line begins with understanding how it works.
Hockey is how researcher Jessica Pointing explains quantum computing’s processing capabilities. With the puck representing zeros, bits and ones, each puck scored into the net equals an algorithm solved. But what if you were able to hit the puck with more than just the hockey stick? "You’d probably be able to score a goal faster, and it’s the same with quantum computers," said Pointing, who is doing graduate work in quantum computing at Stanford University. "We're allowing extra dimensions and possibilities so you’re able to solve certain types of problems significantly faster."
Rather than improving the binary processing, quantum computers promise the speed, power and functionality not possible with the classic computing businesses use today. "They're really computational engines, so you’re not going to shove gigabytes of data into a quantum computer," Bob Sutor, vice president of IBM Q Strategy and Ecosystem, said.
IBM Q is the quantum computing experiment that arose out of IBM Research, which is developing universal quantum computers for enterprise and science use.
The problem-solving potential includes both cracking and uncrackable cryptography, drug development, forecasting extreme weather and possibly predicting the stock market.
Because science can't be rushed, harnessing the technology will take time to understand, Sutor explained. While quantum computers will likely work in tandem with classic computers, ultimately they won't serve as a substitute. "All the code and applications that you have running on classical computers will not run on quantum computers."
