Andrew Houck

It's just never going to happen in the age of our universe.

The way quantum computers work is...

is by shortening that list of steps.

They work differently.

And so problems that can only be solved one way on classical computers take just fewer steps.

And so that is what makes it possible to solve things in relatively short timescales that we just don't know how to solve in any other way.

A lot of times we're thinking about simulating systems that involve atoms and molecules and electrons, and those themselves are quantum mechanical objects.

And so you're usually trying to use classical things to represent this vast quantum superposition space.

And that's incredibly inefficient.

The idea of simulating systems that are themselves quantum mechanical with a quantum computer is essentially trying to use something that can natively think in a quantum-y way and therefore might be able to more efficiently get to the kinds of solutions we need.

It can look at a much wider range of possibilities.

And for those problems in particular, for things involving drugs and materials, it just speaks natively in the right language, right?

Those are quantum systems.

And it's very inefficient to describe a quantum system without using a quantum system to represent it.

That's exactly right.

Those systems exist as atoms and molecules, and the language of quantum was developed to describe the world at that level.

We don't actually know what quantum computing can do with certainty.

There are a few things we can prove.

We know they have real implications for cybersecurity.

We believe that you can simulate quantum systems much more efficiently on them.