The Diverse Pathways to Quantum Computing
More and more outsiders are feeling a strong pull to the nascent world of Quantum—mechanics, computing, information, engineering, and more. It is not just classical scientists and engineers that are finding their way in, but also a variety of business people, writers, and entrepreneurs. If you don’t believe this, you don’t know Jack—or Andi and Abhijit, for that matter.
When it comes to the interdisciplinary world of Quantum science and technology, there is no singular background that can account for the required range of skillsets—quantum physics, computer science, electronics, electrical engineering, materials science, and so on. Furthermore, the required range of skillsets is not at all something closed, fixed, or precisely determined. The Quantum space continues to evolve, and unexpected pathways are very much expected.
Motivation from the market is plain to see, as evident in recent projections from The Global Quantum Computing Market Assessment 2022-2027:
The global market for QC hardware will exceed $8.3 billion by 2027
Leading application areas are simulation, optimization, and sampling
Managed services will reach $298 million by 2027 with CAGR of 43.9%
Key professional services will be deployment, maintenance, and consulting
QC based on superconducting (cooling) loops tech will reach $3.7B by 2027
Fastest growing industry verticals will be government, energy, and transportation
Meanwhile, exciting developments ranging from a toolkit for Quantum Natural Language Processing to break-throughs in Quantum Computer hardware, such as IBM’s 127-qubit quantum Eagle processor and Quantinuum setting a new bar on the highest quantum volume with its System Model H1-2, which increased its speed by 10X in under a year.
Fascination with Quantum often starts with Many Worlds, Superposition, Entanglement, Wave/Particle Duality, and of course, Schrödinger's cat. In many respects, it’s just plain weird—a view not foreign to eminent Quantum Physicists themselves. There isn’t even a consensus interpretation on why the core, heavily exploited properties of Quantum Mechanics work as they do. Yet they work and are applied predictably in the field.
What does it mean, one wonders, that a Qubit, aka the Quantum Bit, the real-life entity played by Computer Science’s most famous actor, the Bit, is often not simply inhabiting one of its possible values at a given point in time, but rather, constitutes a complex linear combination of possible states? As we find, the Bit is only an approximation, an abstraction of the Qubit. This Bit, a Boolean wunderkind, is responsible for so much computational expressiveness when working in conjunction with a multitude of other bits. It is mind-blowing, then to imagine, what a collection of Qubits could express.
The Garden of Forking Paths, the title of a subtly famous story by Jorge Luis Borges, nicely captures the situation of having diverse pathways to a career in Quantum. For the programmer, it can be simple as learning one of the many Quantum Computing libraries and pushing into public spaces like GitHub.
For hardware engineers, to actually do Quantum, there’s no escaping some level of understanding of Quantum Mechanics. For example, a Hardware engineer working on a system with semiconductor Qubits would need to know Cryogenic techniques, Microwave engineering, Nanofabrication, and data acquisition.
In other cases, such as chemistry, Quantum may actually become a requirement when dealing with materials such as plasmas and flames, since arriving at high-precision chemical predications in these cases requires solving the molecular Schrödinger equation exactly. So many fields like machine learning, optimization, finance, and cryptography, have spawned Quantum counterparts that require substantial classical expertise.
The quickest way into Quantum is sometimes the one you are already doing, as many fields are becoming revitalized with solutions to previously prohibitive problems rooted in intractable, computation complexity. Here are just a few examples:
Genome assembly using quantum and quantum-inspired annealing
Quantum logic detection of collisions between single atom–ion pairs
This is all to say that the world of Quantum is open to newcomers, without a hard requirement for a new PhD in many cases, and we will shine the light on those paths. We will also shine light on the endless developments, algorithms, and opportunities occurring in this space, which is useful for insiders as well as outsiders.
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