Coronavirus
Coronavirus has made it possible that for the first time in a long while, the world faces a fight against an enemy with a different tactic. A biological war, a war against all of humanity.
Some months back, the USA and China had put the world on the brink of world war 3, and they were about to ignite a war against themselves, man against man. Meanwhile, at the corner was a different fight waiting, a fight that would cause all of mankind to cease all personal qualms and fight to survive.
The world health organization, (WHO) has been fighting the coronavirus pandemic and have been aiding the different country’s health sector to battle it out together.
The health sector has not been the only one helping out; the tech sector has also been doing its part, tech giants like Microsoft, Google, IBM, Amazon, and Honeywell are in the forefront of this.
It is notable to say that there is something else these tech giants are working on separately that could help in this fight, cue in quantum supremacy.
In layman terms, quantum supremacy is the ability for a computer to carry out a task or get the solution to an algorithm in an exponentially faster amount of time in comparison to your regular computer or your present-day supercomputers.
In comparison, the information in traditional computers is in the forms of 1s and 0s, that is, bits. While for quantum computers, they come as 1, 0, and every possibility between 1 and 0, that is e. qubits.
Using a graphic description of a mouse in a maze, in regular computers, the mouse gets to its first option and takes a path. If that path fails, it comes back and takes another way until it gets to its desired destination. But with quantum computing, the mouse gets to its first option, and at the same time, it takes all the paths simultaneously to get to its desired destination.
The roles computers have in medicine is enormous, ranging from radiotherapy to drug research, to diagnostics research and disease screening, imaging, genomic medicine.
In drug research, computers help to test the different concentrations of elements that can be used to treat a specific ailment.
This means testing hydrogen and chlorine in a particular ratio to get hydrochloride. That is done at the speed of modern computers we have at the moment. In stark comparison, the concept of quantum supremacy with quantum computers can speed the testing of this by making it 100 times faster.
Quantum computers are presently being worked on by different tech giants including Google, IBM, Amazon, Intel, Honeywell, and Microsoft, they have made various personal leaps and strides in the race to quantum computing. But as far from, realisation as it is to get a fully functional quantum computer to work, there is the conception that coming together to work on quantum computing would obviously increase the speed at which this is achieved.
The Covid-19 might be a long shot to depend on the work of quantum computers for, but with an ever-evolving world, there is the need to have a source of fast and accurate answers to all the problems that the world might face at any point in time.
This pandemic has brought us to the realisation that it is not about who gets there first, but for the sake of humanity and survival, it should be about getting there fast.
ThatA is going to cause us a lot of pain; hopefully we would recover fully from it and stand stronger together to equip ourselves for the future.
