still work closely with universities and national laboratories. There is no consensus as to what is the best technology or design. D-Wave led the first generation but its computers are technically limited and scientifically controversial. Although D-Wave should survive as a niche player, IBM and Google seem more likely to dominate the next generation, with Microsoft and maybe a startup or two close on their heels. 12

 

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Michael A. Cusumano ( [e-mail]) is a professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management and founding director of the Tokyo Entrepreneurship and Innovation Center at Tokyo University of Science.

The author thanks Ganesh Vaidyanathan for his comments.

Copyright held by author.

used a D-Wave computer to do complex simulations of protein molecule unfolding (useful in drug discovery).22 Since 2013, NASA and Google, along with several universities, have been using D-Wave computers in their joint Quantum AI Lab. 7 The Lab has explored Web search, speech recognition, planning and scheduling, and operations management. 9 Since 2014, Northrup-Grumman has been using D-Wave to simulate large-scale software systems behavior (useful for error detection). 4 Volkswagen, BMW, and Google are relying on D-Wave to analyze the huge amounts of data needed for self-driving cars. In 2017, Volkswagen used a $15-million D-Wave computer accessed via the cloud to optimize the airport routes of 10,000 taxis in Beijing. The machine processed GPS data in seconds that would normally take a computer 45 minutes. The programming took six months, however, and some experts doubt the results, which have not been published in a scientific journal. 6, 11

Perhaps the “killer app” will be quantum encryption and secure communications. These applications utilize an algorithm discovered in 1994 by Peter Shor, formerly of Bell Labs and now at MIT. Shor demonstrated how to use a quantum computer to factor very large numbers. Entanglement also makes it possible to have unbreakable cryptographic keys across different locations. Governments (the U.S. and China in particular) as well as companies (AT&T, Alibaba, BT, Fujitsu, HP, Huawei, Mitsubishi, NEC, Raytheon, and Toshiba, among others) have been pursuing these applications.c China seems especially advanced. 18

Do quantum computers represent a
new general-purpose computing “plat-
form?” No. Quantum computers are
special-purpose devices that exploit
quantum phenomena for massively
parallel computations. They are not
suited to everyday computing tasks
that require speed, precision, and
ease of use at low cost. The compet-
ing technologies also seem useful for
different applications, and so multi-
ple types of quantum computers may
persist, splitting potential applica-
tion ecosystems. D-Wave computers
c https://bit.ly/2OXEA5n
tackle optimization and simulation
problems. They cannot run Shor’s
algorithm, and so may not be not
useful for cryptography or quantum
communications. IBM, Google, and
Microsoft, as well as several startups,
are designing more general-purpose
devices, but these are still theoreti-
cal, experimental, or small scale.

For the business to progress faster, more people need access to bigger quantum computers so they can build better programming tools and test real-world applications. Toward this end, IBM has made small quantum computers available via the cloud and is heading toward bigger devices; users have already run approximately 300,000 experiments. 12, 15 Google has made its D-Wave computer available to researchers as a cloud service. 8 Google is also designing bigger machines with a different technology. Microsoft announced in 2017 that it would offer up to 40 qubits via a simulator on the Azure cloud. Microsoft has also created a quantum programming language called Q# and integrated this with Visual Studio. 3,d However, Microsoft has not yet built physical devices and the programming language may be completely specific to its architecture. 5

In short, quantum computing still resembles conventional computing circa the late 1940s and early 1950s. We have laboratory devices and some commercial products and services, but mostly from one company. We have incompatible architectures still in the research stage, with different strengths and weaknesses. All the machines require specialized skills to build and program. Companies d https://bit.ly/2B4SMFg Perhaps the “killer app” will be quantum encryption and secure communications.