What is quantum computing, and why does it matter?
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. A pair of eye-catching recent announcements from Microsoft and Google have injected new excitement into the decades-long pursuit of ultrapowerful quantum computing. Microsoft researchers on Wednesday unveiled an approach to quantum computing that the company claimed involved the creation of a new state of matter.
That followed Google in December touting its own breakthrough in quantum chip design. Both advances were followed by a surge in quantum-related stock prices as investors bet they could speed the development of a new category of computers that could help in the discovery of drugs, among other applications. Still, quantum computing remains in its relative infancy.
A handful of startups and big tech companies are pursuing it, but industry experts say it will likely take years before practical and powerful quantum computers are widely available. Regular computers make computations using what are effectively on-off switches. Different arrangements of these switches—called “bits"—represent different values.
They tell your computer or phone what to display on your screen, or what the correct result of a math problem is. The number of bits that computers work with, and thus their computational power, has grown substantially over the past half-century. But quantum computers, when they come, promise to increase that power for certain types of computations to levels no binary-based device could conceivably reach.
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