March of the clever machines
A single adult human is composed of more than seven octillion atoms (that’s 7,00 0,000,000,000,000,000,00 0,000,000). To build a conventional computer with the same power as IBM’s new 127-qubit (we’ll come to them in a moment) Eagle processor, the number of traditional computer bits needed would be more than the number of atoms contained in all the Earth’s population – more than 7.5 billion people.
It’s not hard to see why quantum computing is a potentially game-changing and mind-blowing science.
The technology isn’t perfected yet, but predictions are that the problems they could solve are way beyond the realm of traditional computing, including better ways of managing risk and optimising returns in investment portfolios.
