What can a quantum computer do?
What if instead of going through years of trial and error to see which mixture of chemicals and organic molecules are effective against a disease, biotech and pharmaceutical companies could fast forward, shaving years off of the process to find effective drugs?
That’s the promise of quantum computing.
“It’s almost like playing a game with a new set of rules that allow you to do different things, and those new rules with quantum computing will allow us to simulate things that today are kind of impossible to do,” said Alex Mack, who works with PsiQuantum, a company attempting to build the world’s first commercially useful quantum computer.
“So it’s not really about speeding things up. It’s really about answering problems that can’t be answered on computers today because the rules don’t allow it.”
The “rules” being that classical computers, like your laptop, process information one piece at a time. If a commercial quantum computer can be built, it would be able to analyze large amounts of information all at once instead of one at a time, thanks to quantum physics.
Is it possible? PsiQuantum thinks so.
Where is quantum computing in development?
Quantum computers have been around for decades, but mostly as experiments in the science and research labs of universities and technology companies.
“They’re interesting to academics and to some research institutions but they’re not powerful enough to do anything commercially useful,” Mack said.
PsiQuantum plans to build a quantum computer in South Chicago, at the site where the steel plant South Works operated more than three decades ago.
The difference between the quantum computers that exist today and the one that PsiQuantum plans to build is a measurement unique to the emerging industry: qubits.
Short for quantum bits, qubits are units of information that the computer processes. The higher the number of qubits, the more complicated the problems the computer can solve. So far, tech companies and researchers have built quantum computers with thousands of qubits.
But companies would need a computer capable of processing far more—hundreds of thousands to millions—in order to make commercial advancements in some of the biggest industries in the world: health, energy, finances, logistics and information security.
What’s the timeline for a commercially useful quantum computer?
PsiQuantum anticipates they can build and put to use their quantum computer in a few years.
But industry experts predict the timeline for commercial use of quantum computers to be anywhere from five years to decades away, said Kate Timmerman, the CEO of Chicago Quantum Exchange, a hub for advancing the quantum industry by working with universities, government and companies.
Others question whether such a computer could be built at all.
“The problems of noise and errors and the sensitivity of quantum systems, we would have to overcome those,” Seth Lloyd, a professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology specializing in quantum technology, said during an interview with physicist Brian Greene at the August 2024 World Science Festival.
“We’re kind of in a push-comes-to-shove time where it looks like it’s kind of 50/50 we’re going to be able to make these large quantum computers.”
Lloyd isn’t sure what the timeline looks like: “I’d say 10 years plus or minus never.”
Other types of quantum technology
But computing is only one type of quantum technology.
Quantum sensors, which detect motion and are already in use, are the most developed of the emerging technologies, according to the Chicago Quantum Exchange. And quantum communication technology will advance data protection.
It’s possible that the quantum park will attract companies developing sensors and communications tools.
“Each of them are at different technology readiness levels,” said Timmerman, CEO of the Chicago Quantum Exchange. “Each of them have different kinds of current markets (in terms of) who are their customers and future economic benefits of future markets.”
