What Is Quantum Computing and How It’s Changing Government – FedTech Magazine

The Federal Aviation Administration, for example, needs to maximize the number of planes that can come into an airport, Williams says. Thats easy on an ordinary day. But when a thunderstorm comes in and disrupts air travel, they need to reoptimize quickly to get all the planes to come in in a safe an effective manner.

Quantum does that extremely well, and the same techniques could be applied by the Defense Department to tackle transportation problems in order to better organize troop movements. Optimization problems are everywhere, Williams says.

Researchers also are looking at quantum computings ability to process complex and subtle interactions at the subatomic level. Robust computing here could make quantum a potentially powerful new tool for designing new drugs and medical treatments, something that could benefit agencies like the National Institutes of Health and the Department of Veterans Affairs.

Any place where quantum physics is at the core of a capability, quantum computing will be useful, Williams says. We could look at the processes going on deep in the earth and predict the most powerful earthquake to ever hit California two weeks before it happens.

In a mathematical sense, quantum physics is all about uncertainty and probabilities. Those principles could be applied in a military context. In war, the biggest problem is that you never know what your opponent is going to do. There is a certain randomness in it, Williams says. In a war game scenario, a quantum approach ensures that a war game would never play the same way twice. You could play through all the possibilities, and that begins to eliminate that randomness.

In the near term, governments biggest role may be in helping to further the evolution of this emerging technology. Government labs and government-funded universities play an important role in fundamental research and the education of future quantum computing scientists and engineers, Sutor says.

For example, in August of this year, the Air Force Research Lab announced it was joining the IBM Q Network in an effort to investigate quantum applications in algorithms, machine learning, neural network training and other areas. Such efforts could drive the creation of a new community for industry and application-oriented quantum computation strategies, Sutor says.

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A few key terms around quantum computing include quantum annealing, quantum simulations and universal quantum computing. Its worth taking a slightly deeper dive to understand these.

A range of large and small tech players are tackling this, including Google, IBM, Microsoftand Honeywell.

There are many companies exploring these possibilities and they are all contributing to a competitive environment. But its early days, its the Wild West, Williams says.

The first companies involved today are looking for a niche market, a simulation or a solution to a very specific problem, he adds. We will find a few of those niche things of interest to scientists, and then well just have to see what else comes to fruition.

It may be a decade or more before we see widespread adoption of quantum computing. Government, meanwhile, can help create an environment in which innovation and experimentation around quantum can flourish. Open-source access and adoption is how an ecosystem of developers, scientists, educators and professionals across different industries will get quantum ready for this new generation of computing, Sutor says.

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What Is Quantum Computing and How It's Changing Government - FedTech Magazine