CIO’s Guide: Eight Ways Quantum Computing Is Going to Change the World

(ZDNet) ZDNet’s Daphne Leprince-Ringuet has prepared a list of eight ways quantum computing is going to change the world” for the “CIO’s Guide to Quantum Computing: and IQT-News summarizes:

1. Discovering new drugs: Quantum computers have the potential to one day resolve the molecular simulation problem in minutes rather than the current drug discovery timeline that can take years.
Pharmaceutical companies are paying attention: earlier this year, healthcare giant Roche announced a partnership with Cambridge Quantum Computing (CQC) to support efforts in research tackling Alzheimer’s disease.

2. Creating better batteries: Similar to drug design, therefore, battery design is another data-heavy job that’s better suited to a quantum computer than a classical device.
This is why German car manufacturer Daimler has now partnered with IBM to assess how quantum computers could help simulate the behaviour of sulphur molecules in different environments.

3.Predicting the weather: Despite the vast amounts of compute power available from today’s cutting-edge supercomputers, weather forecasts — particularly longer-range ones — can still be disappointingly inaccurate. Quantum computers could model how innumerable environmental factors all come together to create a major storm, a hurricane or a heatwave.

4. Picking Stocks: JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs and Wells Fargo are all actively investigating the potential of quantum computers to improve the efficiency of banking operations — a use case often put forward as one that could come with big financial rewards. The process that’s already showing promise is the application of quantum computing to a procedure known as Monte Carlo simulation.

5. Processing language: The field is known as quantum natural language processing (QNLP), and is a key focus of Cambridge Quantum Computing (CQC). The company has already experimentally shown that sentences can be parameterised on quantum circuits, where word meanings can be embedded according to the grammatical structure of the sentence.

6. Helping to solve the travelling salesman problem: Energy giant ExxonMobil has been trying to optimise the daily routing of merchant ships crossing the oceans — that is, more than 50,000 ships carrying up to 200,000 containers each, to move goods with a total value of $14 trillion. ExxonMobil, therefore, teamed up with IBM to find out if quantum algorithms could do a better job.

7. Reducing congestion: Microsoft has been working on this use case together with Toyoto Tsusho and quantum computing startup Jij. The researchers have begun developing quantum-inspired algorithms in a simulated city environment, with the goal of reducing congestion. According to the experiment’s latest results, the approach could bring down traffic waiting times by up to 20%.

8. Protecting sensitive data: Random number generation is an application of quantum computing that is already nearing commercialisation. UK-based startup Nu Quantum, for example, is finalizing a system that can measure the behavior of quantum particles to generate streams of random numbers that can then be used to build stronger cryptography keys.