The Honeywell industrial plant claims that its latest quantum computer is now the fastest in the world. The speed with which the real world applications will grow or how quickly they can influence or affect industries cryptographic systems such as Bitcoin been a die beats rigorous.
In a Thursday announcement, Honeywell said its team of scientists, engineers and technicians had delivered a quantum volume of 64. The measurement measures both the total number of qubits on the computer and how they manages. The IBM machine got a 32, which suggests that Honeywell's quantum computer is twice as fast.
Honeywell's machine is designed to add up to 640,000 quantum bits (qubits) as the system evolves. Tony Uttley, president of Honeywell's quantum computing division, told CNET,
“Think of an auditorium with lots of seats. We built the infrastructure to make it an auditorium. We fill it a few places at a time. "
Quantum computing is able to solve complex problems because qubits can maintain an "overlay" by being in two states at the same time.
Add Uttley,
"It means that when you have these qubits interacting with each other in a computation, you get, what I call, a quantum superpower. You get an exponential expansion in the number of values that can all be taken into account at the same time. "
Honeywell has partnered with Microsoft's Azure Quantum to bring quantum computing directly to various businesses to solve real-world problems.
Appearing on CNBC in March, Darius Adamczyk, CEO of Honeywell, said that JPMorgan, the largest bank in the United States, was one of the flagship clients of its quantum computing division.
“There are really different [applications]. Everything related to materials science, route optimization, financial software - and that's why JPMorgan will use it - anything that really overwhelms a classic computer is a perfect application for a quantum computer taking into account the available computing power. "
Adamczyk says the possibilities are endless.
Totally add,
"We focused on these real business problems for which quantum computing has the potential to completely transform, completely disrupt this business."
The race for quantum supremacy has a growing list of competitors, including Google and IBM. The startup PsiQuantum Corp works on a photon-based commercial quantum computer that promises 1 million qubits.
While technicians expect quantum computing to transform and impact almost all industries, including cryptographically secure systems like Bitcoin and other blockchains, more qubits are needed.
Dragos Ilie, a quantum computing and encryption researcher at Imperial College London, argues that adding more and more qubits to evolve a system is tricky and can ultimately lead to a destabilized system.
“The Google supercomputer currently has 53 qubits.
To have an effect on bitcoin or most other financial systems, it would take at least around 1,500 qubits and the system must allow the entanglement of all… ”
As crypto industry leaders like Charles Hayter, managing director of CryptoCompare, highlight the programmability of cryptocurrencies as a fundamental property that will allow blockchain-based platforms to adapt to the era of quantum computing, a report released in April by the Global Risk Institute, argues that quantum risk to cryptographic systems will require continuous assessment based on the latest developments and new algorithms.
"Estimating the strength of current cryptographic schemes against realistic quantum attacks is a moving target that depends on a variety of parameters, such as fault tolerant quantum error correction, circuit optimization and compilation, the new results of cryptanalysis, improved quantum algorithms, etc . (future) progress is therefore of paramount importance and underlines the importance of preparing for migration to quantum-resistant cryptographic systems. "
