Quantum Computers are the closest we have come to time travel.
47 years ago
A little over 47 years ago, a quantum computer was only an idea to be found in the scribblings of Physicist Charles H. Bennet.
Meanwhile, classical computer technology was already advanced. On April 11, 1976, Apple.INC released their Apple-1 Computer with a 1 MHz CPU. 1 MHz equals 1 million cycles per second, which implies the ability to clock 1 million primitive instructions – “switchings” / “flippings” of transistor states between 1 and 0 – every second. It could play some text-based games.
Today, the Apple MacBook Pro has 12 CPU cores and a 3.7 GHz chip. That is 3.7 billion Hz to give a 3700x increase from 1976.
Now here’s the news.
First, Quantum Computers are now real devices boasting 1 to 70 to 433 qubits.
Second, your sleek Apple MacBook Pro would need upwards of 270 million billion years to match a 70-qubit Quantum Computer at Random Circuit Sampling. Of course, Frontier (see below), not a MacBook Pro, is the ultimate classical computing beast on the planet. But despite its 1.1 Quintillion Hz CPU and GPU processors, it would still need … take a guess … 47 years to beat a 70 qubit Sycamore chip.
What a beautiful intersection of time to be at.
Below - Apple MacBook Pro. Looking like a bird.
Below - what we’ve been waiting for 🙂?
47 years into the Future
Indeed, quantum computers mean business. They do not play games. Figuratively and Literally. Also, they can manipulate matrices in the complex plane. Something no matrix-crunching GPU training a billion-dollar neural net can possibly imagine.
But what excites me most is the back to the future-ness of these machines. On the one hand, they are still stuck in the Stone Age, barely factorizing 21. On the other, they seem to be way beyond anything we could possibly imagine. Prof. Michio Kaku says they are running on Parallel-Universes juice. By existing in a superposition of 1 and 0, a 1000-qubit quantum computer simulates, at the hardware level, more bit states than there are atoms in the observable universe. Do note however that 1000 qubits can be made from only 1000 atoms (!).
Now try imagining we had never invented a quantum computer till today. For whatever reason. It means if we had the Random Circuit Sampling problem on our plates, our best behemoth classical computers could only be expected to crunch numbers for 47 years non-stop. I mean, who would wait that long??
What would we have done? Consigned some problems to the dust-bin of insolvables, that’s what. Because nobody can patiently wait out such high and dry drags for computations. Not in this high-speed world.
I do not know what will happen 47 years from now, but I know this. The list of unique problems solvable by quantum computers in seconds which billion-dollar, acres-wide CPU x GPU farms need 100, 200, 500 years to solve, will only grow. Hopefully, it will grow as fast as Moore’s law, doubling every year to give us more and moore ways to peek into the far future. Computationally speaking.
Miscellaneous - Encoding the word ‘Apple1’ as qubit states on a Quantum Computer Simulator (my laptop) using Qiskit
from qiskit import * from qiskit.visualization import array_to_latex
'''To encode the words 'Apple1' in the language of quantum computers I will first convert each of those 6 ASCII characters to its binary equivalent.
Then I will initialize a quantum state for those binary characters using a 256-element list (because 2^8 = 256)
It is not pretty but that will be my tribute to the Apple1 computer.'''
#A = 01000001 = position 65
#p = 01110000 = position 112
#p = 01110000 = position 112
#l = 01101100 = position 108
#e = 01100101 = position 101
#1 = 00110001 = position 49
qc = QuantumCircuit(8, 8)
qc.initialize([0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0, 0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0, 0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0, 0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0, 0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0, 0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0, 1/(6****0.5),0,0,0,0,0,0,0, 0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0, 1/(6****0.5),0,0,0,0,0,0,0, 0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0, 0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0, 0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0, 0,0,0,0,1/(6****0.5),0,0,0, 0,0,0,1/(6****0.5),0,0,0,(2****0.5)/(6****0.5), 0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0, 0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0, 0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0, 0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0, 0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0, 0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0, 0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0, 0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0, 0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0, 0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0, 0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0, 0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0, 0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0, 0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0, 0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0, 0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0, 0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0, 0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,], qc.qubits)
sim = Aer.get_backend('statevector_simulator')
job = execute(qc, sim)
quantum_state = job.result().get_statevector()
#Print the quantum state and compare with the encoding chosen
quantum_state.draw('latex')