Need to make software developers use quantum computing

In the session on “Commercializing quantum for business”, the future of quantum computing was discussed and how it has the power to transform almost all the industries in the world

Dr. Heiki Riel, IBM Fellow, Lead Quantum, IBM Research Europe, talked about the quantum advantage we will gain in the next decade. It is a new type of computing where we use the laws of quantum mechanics for computation. Here, we are using quantum bits. The quantum computer uses entanglement, superposition, inference, etc, to utilize a much bigger computational space. It has the potential to solve problems that classical computers cannot do. These are problems that exponentially increase in complexity. Quantum computers have the potential to solve problems are seen everywhere across the industries.

Today we have learnt to solve problems via approximations. For some of the use cases, the approximations are not working well. This is where we want to apply quantum computers in the future. There are optimization issues, such as routing problems. You can do traffic routing and parcel routing. These are very mathematical problems that quantum computing can solve better.

Materials development is another key area. Here, materials form the core of a lot of industries. Materials development brings lot of market and business potential in the future. Today, developing new materials takes really long time. Quantum computing can help in making these kinds of calculations much faster, more energy-efficient, and bring more precise results.