IBM has announced an industry-first initiative to build commercially available universal
quantum computing systems.
“IBM Q” quantum systems and services will be delivered via the IBM Cloud platform.
While technologies that currently run on classical computers, such as Watson, can help find patterns
and insights buried in vast amounts of existing data, quantum computers will deliver solutions
to important problems where patterns cannot be seen because the data doesn’t exist and
the possibilities that you need to explore to get to the answer are too enormous to ever
be processed by classical computers.
IBM also announced the release of a new API for the IBM Quantum Experience that enables
developers and programmers to begin building interfaces between its existing five quantum
bit (qubit) cloud-based quantum computer and classical computers, without needing a deep
background in quantum physics.
And, also announced the release of an upgraded simulator on the IBM Quantum Experience that
can model circuits with up to 20 qubits.
In the first half of 2017, IBM plans to release a full SDK (Software Development Kit) on the
IBM Quantum Experience for users to build simple quantum applications and software programs.
The IBM Quantum Experience enables anyone to connect to IBM’s quantum processor via
the IBM Cloud, to run algorithms and experiments, work with the individual quantum bits, and
explore tutorials and simulations around what might be possible with quantum computing.
IBM Q systems will be designed to tackle problems that are currently seen as too complex and
exponential in nature for classical computing systems to handle.
One of the first and most promising applications for quantum computing will be in the area
of chemistry.
Even for simple molecules like caffeine, the number of quantum states in the molecule can
be astoundingly large – so large that all the conventional computing memory and processing
power scientists could ever build could not handle the problem.
IBM’s scientists have developed techniques to efficiently explore the simulation of chemistry
problems on quantum processors and experimental demonstrations of various molecules are in
progress.
In the future, the goal will be to scale to even more complex molecules and try to predict
chemical properties with higher precision than possible with classical computers.