Computers that exploit the weird rules of quantum mechanics may soon crack problems that are unsolvable using existing technology. Today’s machines are still far from achieving that, but the field of quantum computing has made dramatic progress since its inception.
1981: Richard Feynman popularizes quantum computingBoth Benioff and legendary physicist Richard Feynman gave talks on quantum computing at the first Physics of Computation Conference in 1981. Feynman’s keynote speech was on the topic of using computers to simulate physics. He pointed out that because the physical world is quantum in nature, simulating it exactly requires computers that similarly operate based on the rules of quantum mechanics.
1996: Quantum computing takes on searchIt didn’t take long for another promising application to appear. Bell Labs computer scientist Lov Grover proposed a quantum algorithm for unstructured search, which refers to looking for information in databases with no obvious system of organization. This is like looking for the proverbial needle in a haystack and is a common problem in computer science, but even the best classical search algorithms can be slow when faced with large amounts of data.
2011: First commercial quantum computer releasedDespite considerable progress, quantum computing was still primarily an academic discipline. The launch of the first commercially available quantum computer by Canadian company D-Wave in May 2011 heralded the start of the quantum computing industry. The start-up’s D-Wave One featured 128 superconducting qubits and cost roughly $10 million. However, the device wasn’t a universal quantum computer.
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