The Race to ‘Quantum Practicality’ a Marathon and Not a Sprint Says Intel’s Uhlig

(NewsroomIntel) Universities, governments and technology companies around the world are striving to achieve a commercially-viable quantum computing system. While the collective progress is real – and is getting noticed – the field is still at mile one of what will be a marathon toward quantum computing’s commercialization.
This editorial by Rich Uhlig of Intel urges that we turn our attention to the steps it will take to build a system that will enable us to address intractable challenges — in other words, to demonstrate “quantum practicality.” To get a sense of what it would take to achieve quantum practicality, Intel researchers used our high-performance quantum simulator to predict the point at which a quantum computer could outpace a supercomputer in solving an optimization problem called Max-Cut. We chose Max-Cut as a test case because it is widely used in everything from traffic management to electronic design, and because it is an algorithm that gets exponentially more complicated as the number of variables increases.
Intel works with our partners and the research community to speed advancement across the complete quantum computing stack so every mile marker passed in this marathon will bring us closer to true quantum practicality.
Intel will continue to overcome many challenges – and pass many mile markers – on this incredible journey of discovery before this technology will change lives.
Uhlig says to applaud this scientific moment and set our sights on what we will achieve at the finish line much further down the road: quantum practicality.