What Does Quantum Ready Mean?
Everyone’s buzzing about getting quantum ready, focused on how soon quantum can help their business and what value they can expect.
Unfortunately, too many are focused on the when and why for pure quantum, as if quantum will take over from classical computing for a majority of their production processing.
That’s not the case.
Will there be pure-quantum computing applications? Absolutely. For very specific problem solving scenarios.
Do we have to wait for pure quantum to gather value from quantum computing? No. It’s not a binary, ready or not ready, technology deployment.
Does quantum ready have a standard industry definition? Not really. As with all emerging markets, everyone has their own perception, at least for a while until the market begins to mature and converge.
What Do Vendors Mean When They Say Quantum Ready?
That depends. I know, we say that too often in quantum, as with all emerging technology sectors. The most used definition is that being ready for quantum means it’s ready to run on a quantum computer. Or an organization is ready to use a quantum computer to its advantage. Some use the term to mean being ready for the potential cyberattacks that a quantum computer could create thanks to its power to break cryptography techniques used today. Quantum ready can also refer to the extensive training and education demanded by hardware vendors’ software development kits to even be able to begin to write a quantum program.
Regardless, the simple definition is that quantum ready means exactly what it says – something that is ready for quantum computing.
Here at QCi, we have an extended meaning – embracing both classical and quantum processing and how to apply quantum techniques to either of them, or across a hybrid architecture.
What is Quantum Ready in Qatalyst™?
QCi believes that quantum approaches and techniques can be applied to classical processing to capture business value today. Instead of focusing purely on quantum for quantum’s sake, our technologists focused on applying quantum techniques to classical and quantum computing. Qatalyst is designed to create a seamless bridge between the two, harnessing quantum power immediately within classical systems,
Qatalyst is designed to solve complex constrained optimization problems, as well as graph problems like community detection, using both classical and quantum computing. All of its API function calls, mathematical functions, processing flows, data transformations and computational intelligence are designed to run as quantum ready across both types of systems.
A few examples include;
- All of Qatalyst’s computational algorithms are quantum ready. They run on quantum computers. They also run on classical systems, with no new programming.
- Its six API function calls are quantum ready and are used for both classical and quantum processing.
- Based on the specific quantum ready function that is called, Qatalyst automatically defines a QUBO from the problems or requests that an SME or workflow submits. Each QUBO is quantum ready, and is processed through the Qatalyst Core, then submitted to a classical or quantum machine. Its format and structure serves to accelerate classical processing, even as it submits the QUBO to an annealing machine, or transforms it using QAOA and submits to a gate model machine.
- QGraph techniques are all quantum-ready, meaning that SMEs or workflows can submit graphs to clique cover, partitioning or community detection functions, which are then computed via the Qatalyst core across classical, annealing or gate model quantum computers.
We aren’t waiting for pure quantum to provide value that’s quantum ready. We provide it right now, by applying quantum ready techniques to classical systems, even as we provide a seamless bridge to quantum systems if and when they are needed.
The Bottom Line
Quantum ready only has value if it provides solutions today. Otherwise it’s waiting for pure quantum systems that can:
- Scale to ingest and process the large data volumes that are required for production problems.
- Solve the error correction issues that prohibit use today.
- Offer software that doesn’t require quantum experts to write deep level problems to be able to solve computational business problems.
Quantum ready classical approaches offer a path to value today, with a seamless bridge to more and more value tomorrow, through hybrid and pure quantum systems.
In that world, we start winning with quantum ready, right now. Regardless of the specific hardware we are using.
