As we wrap up 2021 and begin 2022, IQT News is asking executives from several companies across the quantum sector to weigh in on the state of the industry, key challenges that remain and visions and hopes of the future.
The latest entry in this series comes from Samuel Mugel, CTO of Multiverse Computing, a company that has been among the firms leading the charge in positioning quantum for finance applications. Multiverse announced a seed funding round in October, and a few weeks later announced a finance-focused partnership with IonQ. This month brought news of more funding from the European Innovation Council.
Here’s what Mugel had to say about the need to develop new quantum use cases as a new year dawns:
The industry is dependent on the development of better quantum hardware and better error correction algorithms. However, finding industrial use cases is just as important, as these are critical for justifying the colossal investment needed to push this field forward. Many high-value use cases have been suggested, but most focus on accelerating or improving solutions to well-known problems. People often ignore the real groundbreaking use-cases, which offer solutions to problems we currently cannot solve. Examples include factoring large numbers, simulating chemical reactions, macro-economics simulations, and protein folding.
Looking at macro-economics, for instance, there are a wealth of high-value open problems to be explored, such as simulating the effects of legislation, financial stress testing, and catastrophic events forecasting. Current models completely fail at reliably tackling these, but quantum might offer some viable solutions. I believe the potential of quantum computing will only be realized once we discover these use cases that only quantum can solve.