Aspiring Physicist. Studying a Maths and Philosophy degree at Durham and trying to fix payroll at Onfolk. Previously building a better bank at Monzo.
by Charles Thomas
I’ve been interested in Quantum Computing ever since I heard about it when I was 15. Recently, I’ve become more intrigued by it and have decided to invest some time in learning it. But what is it about this field that interests me?
Well, the short answer is that I like computers, I like physics, put them together and you get Quantum Computing. However, there is more to it than that.
Most jobs can be thought of as solving some kind of problem. For example, if you’re in sales, your problem is how can I get this person to buy this product? So life becomes a question of what kind of problems do you want to solve?
As a software engineer, I’m guilty (as many of us are) of saying “I like to solve hard problems”. But this isn’t really a helpful description of the problems I like to solve because problems can be hard for all sorts of reasons.
Sometimes a problem is hard because it is big. By this I mean the problem can be broken up into many smaller problems which might be easier to solve individually but it is hard to keep track of all the pieces. These kinds of problems might be made harder because of prioritisation - we often have limited resources and have to choose a place to start - or because of people management - big problems might involve large teams.
Other problems are hard because you need to know a lot of context. For example, you might be able to streamline a business process with a Google form and some validation but it might take time to understand the process.
Problems might also be hard because it might not be obvious what the problem even is. This is often the case in the early days of a product when you’re trying to figure out what exactly your customers’ problem is.
Sometimes problems are hard because the technology doesn’t exist yet or is relatively new. In this case, you have to build new technology to solve the problem. This is the kind of hard that is most appealing to me.
Yet, this doesn’t answer why quantum computing specifically. There are many areas where there is new technology being developed. Well, for me there are two other factors that go into why I want to invest time in this area.
The first is that it involves two areas I really enjoy: physics and computer science. But even hard problems involving new technology in an area that I’m interested in can get wearing. Therefore, the other reason I am interested in quantum computing is its ability to have a positive impact on the world.
For example, one of the problems Quantum Computing should help speed up is our ability to simulate quantum systems. This could have a massive impact on the biotech space because we’ll hopefully be simulating large enough systems that we can more easily investigate biological processes. This could be hugely impactful on medicine.
Hopefully, this outlines why I am interested in quantum computing, so now I want to give a quick overview of how I am going about studying it. Taking inspiration from this video from Anastasia Marchenkova I am going to be working through the book Quantum Computation and Quantum Information by Nielsen and Chuang. I’ll also be watching the lectures from MIT here
If you have any suggestions of other resources to check out please let me know!
tags: