Quantum Computer Calculations, Quantum Computing Executive Workshop

As discussed in our live quantum computing workshop, the result of a quantum computation is probabilistic. However, in certain cases, it is fully deterministic , as in the case of a quantum coin toss.

The Quantum Coin Toss

The first coin toss is probabilistic, analogous to the Classical Coin Toss. The second and all successive tosses are deterministic – in that they always give HEADS. This is in contrast to a classical coin toss.

Just like the coin toss can  be ‘tweaked’ to always give the same answer, a more involved quantum computation can also be ‘tweaked’ to be biased towards a certain output..

And therein lies the true power of quantum computing..

Weighted Dice

This can be thought of as ‘weighting’ a dice or a pair of dice – to skew the output towards a particular number. You may not always get the desired answer, but your chances of getting it are considerably increased.

How can this be useful?

You might ask ‘If the answer is randomly selected from a set of answers, how is that useful’? What if the wrong answer is provided? And therein lies the beauty of the ‘Nature of problems’ that can be tackled by quantum computers.

While it takes a quantum computer to SOLVE the original problem (possibly incorrectly), it only takes a simple classical computer to VALIDATE  the answer! So, factorization of a large number into it’s prime divisors is difficult to SOLVE, but easy to validate, once solved..

How far along are we?

In reality, even the slightest interference with the environment disrupts a quantum calculation. This ‘isolation’ is so difficult to achieve, that it has been a barrier to building larger Quantum Computers.

For a detailed Quantum Computing For Executives Workshop, Contact Anuj Varma.