China wants to lead the world in quantum science
IT DOESN’T help to have a quantum computer if no one knows how to program it,” says Tim Polk, of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy in Washington. Although academic efforts to build quantum-computer hardware have been going on for two decades, comparatively little has been done to develop the software needed to run the machines when they come.
One of the most ambitious, LIQUi¦> , comes from Microsoft. It aims to tackle the whole “software stack”, from the user interface to code-compilers and ultimately to a machine language suitable for Microsoft’s planned hardware, and that of others. But the key to getting the most out of quantum computers are the algorithms that these various software packages implement. The first of them, including the one by Peter Shor that showed how quantum computers could crack global encryption systems, tested the theoretical idea by aiming at the most intractable problems on the biggest notional machines.
Many such algorithms, when run on existing special-purpose machines or as emulations on standard computers, fail to beat their “classical” counterparts. Vlatko Vedral, of the National University of Singapore’s Centre for Quantum Technologies, stresses that traditional techniques, particularly for quantum-chemistry problems like the nitrogenase reaction, are already quite sophisticated.
Even as all these computer scientists and consultants are working on software for the quantum future, a handful of others are working on software to combat it. After all, what got researchers going in the first place was the fear that global encryption standards would crumble in the face of quantum computing. That remains a danger for the future, and retrospectively perhaps even for the present, if encrypted communications filed away now are analysed by powerful quantum computers later.
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