Quantum Report Card: Achieving Real Scale That Cannot Be Simulated

The first half of the Quantum Compute Report Card laid out the work IBM continues to do in the development of quantum computing, but there are many more elements to explore.

Scott Crowder, vice president of IBM quantum adoption and business development, says IBM’s development in the space has been on target but also remains cautious about hyping up promises for the future -- reiterating the dilemma that comes with capabilities and use cases for quantum computing cannot be proved until they are proved.

What that future may look like could include input from a host of technology developers and other stakeholders who expect the promise of quantum compute to be fulfilled -- though they maintain grounded perspectives on when that might be.

“Quantum computers now, as they have been for the past decade, are research tools that people are using actively to research how to build better quantum computers,” says Justin Ging, chief product officer with Atom Computing. “How to develop algorithms for them. How to start exploring use cases. How to train people. How to build workforce.”

Quantum computers have not reached the stage of being commercially valuable where they could be included in business processes and operations, he says, however such opportunities are expected to be realized in the long run. “It’s very much a strategic ROI on quantum computers today, but what’s different about today than compared to the past few years is how close we are getting,” he says. “That has to do with this move to logical qubits.” Logical qubits use a set of physical qubits, can be superpositioned, and guard against errors.

“Physical qubits have been the race that everyone’s been part of,” Ging says. “Over the past year, there’s been a tremendous amount of progress in the industry towards logic qubits.”

More News Is Good News

Updates from researchers in this space might seem a bit incremental, but the progress can be relevant. “Almost every week you’ll hear one of the major tech companies talk about, ‘Hey, we’ve achieved a certain number of stable qubits,’” says Jason Soroko, senior fellow with Sectigo, whose field of inquiry in this space is on quantum computers and cryptographic algorithms.

“That’s really important because in order to solve certain kinds of problems with quantum computing, in order to use that extra piece of information, instead of the on and off, you have that superposition, which allows you to solve certain classes of problems.”

Such progress might not turn heads immediately, but the cumulative effect could be substantial. “If you have a sufficient number of stable qubits when it comes to things such as cryptographic algorithms,” Soroko says, “you start to be able to factorize almost instantaneously the entire problem space.”

He explains that with classic cryptographic algorithms such as RSA, the intent is to solve a very large field of prime numbers and knowing them all. A person might know three is a prime number based on their memory, Soroko says, rather than as a calculation. “A quantum computer will be able to, with a superposition and Shor's Algorithm, solve for an enormous amount of prime number space, rendering a 30-year-old or more cryptographic algorithm deprecated, which is a real problem.”   

Waiting for a Technology Sea Change

The transformation quantum computers may bring about have the potential to change the world in fundamental ways, says Sean Michael Brehm, chairman of  Spectral Capital, a quantum-as-a-service accelerator. “You’re going to compare quantum computing to the telegraph and Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone,” he says. “Everybody’s okay with the ‘telegraph’ right now -- that’s the internet -- but when quantum computing comes along in a very near, short period of time, you’re going to see just mindboggling events the same way we saw with the telephone.” Brehm is also founder of CrowdPoint Technologies.

He points out some challenges to further the technology do exist, such as power supply and production for quantum computers. “Even if you had a perfect, working prototype today, the big problem is going to all the toolset manufacturers that are manufacturing for the current Pentium chips,” Brehm says. “So, you’re looking at, at least five years before you’re going to see some moment [for quantum computers].”

Despite those challenges, he says the need for quantum computers continues to grow more tangible -- even if the use cases are not entirely self-evident. “Why do we even need quantum computing?” Brehm asks and acknowledges that many people do not have an answer. He responds to this by framing data as the new oil and much like oil, data must be refined with powerful computers into the Information that fuels the global economy. “Quantum computing is about really, really, really efficient refinement of data into information so it has spatial, temporal, thematic, semantic terms,” he says.

Some milestones for quantum computing might be realized within several years, however it could be another decade for certain significant capabilities to manifest. “There’s estimates out there that we should see something from the quantum computing space that arrives at the end of this decade, around 2029,” says Todd Moore, global head of data security products with Thales.

He says quantum computing is getting real, catching up with some of the lofty notions that surround the technology. “We’re hearing from various analysts that around 2034, there could actually be the potential for a quantum computer that has enough power to implement a potential attack on the asymmetric cryptography that’s implemented in almost everything that we do in our daily lives,” Moore says, “whether it’s from IoT devices talking to the internet, and whether we’re surfing on the internet doing a banking transaction.”

Kevin Bocek, chief innovation officer with Venafi, says recent progress points to the technology gaining ground in its capabilities. “Quantum computing, as far as the compute power and the repeatability, the reliability of the compute certainly is improving,” he says. From Venafi’s work with chief security officers and others, Bocek says awareness and concern about the technology is advancing toward a “starting action” for organizations to prepare.

“That is a material change in the last year, where it has been -- this is a future risk where quantum computers could break today’s cryptography, break today’s identity systems.” Now, he says, strategies are shifting to getting ready for a generational journey with the technology. “It’s not a one-year, two-year transition,” Bocek says.

Patience and Guardrails for Quantum

Part of what needs to happen next, he says, is to gain more understanding of potential risks the technology poses to businesses if it gets in the wrong hands. “Then we’ll be able to triage,” Bocek says. “Once we understand the risk, the triage, we can start to get visibility into gear … Where are we exposed? Where are we using cryptography? Where are we using machine identities as well as identity-based systems that are based on cryptography?”

Development of quantum compute technology is now progressing 10 to 100 times faster than the old standby of Moore’s Law, says Rajeeb Hazra, CEO of Quantinuum. “But it’s in the early stages of development,” he says. “About a year ago, many would not have foreseen the major breakthroughs.”

Hazra says the industry has come to understand that the development of the technology is not just about the number of qubits. “It’s the quality of the qubits that matter,” he says. Technology developers might speak of the volume of qubits, but they may face follow-up questions on the quality level. “Can I do something useful with your million qubits?” Hazra asks.

It is also significant, Hazra says, that quantum compute has reached scales that classical computers can no longer simulate. “Now, for the first time, this quantum computer is generating data and doing things that no classical computer can be programmed to do.”