I had glanced through the mention of IBM’s Quantum Computing a few times but never stopped to know what it is as I was busy either doing the Z Xplore challenges or learning the legacy systems. Quantum Physics is not new to me. Quantum Physics has been close to my heart for many years now. Though an engineer by profession, the theories of light have always fascinated me. Why am I talking about this now? To give a brief background, I have worked with vacuum tube or valve diodes and triodes though semi-conductor devices were in the market already. Valves were still in circulation in old radio and television systems. Semi-conductor devices made valves redundant. The equipment became much smaller too. Then came SMT, surface mount technology and we started seeing much more compact sized electronics equipment. Memory became abundant and cheaper with the advent of semi-conductor devices and as they became smaller and smaller. Currently, the 3D semiconductor technology has enabled miniature electronic devices and memory. Data storage continues to be in electric pulses i.e. 0s and 1s. Whatever we code, whatever we store, whatever keys we press, it will all be stored or acted upon as electric impulses or pulses. 

How does quantum computing change this? I am not an expert, but definitely the one who has been following the developments in this branch of Physics. In quantum computing, the binary data is held in a transient state with the probability of being 0 or 1 at the same time. The implication of this is that the system can have a bird-eye-view of the problem and pick only those iterations that are required to complete a task as opposed to a large number of unnecessary iterations carried out by a traditional computer to complete the same task. Hence task completion time is dramatically reduced. Some companies that are into quantum computing currently use photons (light particle) in fibre optic cables to hold data. In my understanding, IBM uses microwave pulses to hold and transmit data using superconducting circuits consisting of qubits in place of traditional silicon chips. It is interesting to note that qubits too are built over silicon chips as a design modification leveraging on the already existing hardware! That is simply brilliant!!

How does coding change when quantum computers become more and more mainstream? Well, as I understand, nothing or only a little change to the basic coding that we are doing today is required. A few additional lines of code may be required to communicate with the quantum computer. And probably a few omissions since quantum computing is quite different in approach than traditional computing. But what changes for sure is that a coder will also need to understand the principles of Physics to some extent! As a keen observer and follower of technological innovations and changes, I foresee quantum computing to become the mainstream computing in the not-so-distant future! Currently, we may be at the dawn of the next-level high-speed computing era!