COMPUTERS AND QUANTUM COMPUTING: WHAT IS IT AND HOW TO WORK WITH IT?

I was promised flying cars and what I got is TikTok, so when people talk to me about the quantum future I raise an eyebrow. Is quantum computing really going to change our lives, or is it another promise that stays in the lab? To bring it down to earth for me I’m joined by Ismael Faro, who works at IBM from New York as a liaison between developers and researchers.

Ismael explains, without any hype, what this quantum business is, harnessing the behaviour of particles to compute with superposition instead of with zeros and ones, packing the power of an entire data centre into something the size of a tube. We talk about why it scares cryptography (Shor’s algorithm and the factorisation of prime numbers), though he reminds us that resistant ciphers are already being worked on, just as we moved from WEP to WPA. We also ground the practical side, today’s computers are still expensive research toys and real quantum advantage is years away.

What I take away is his way of measuring time depending on whether you’re a hacker, an entrepreneur or a researcher, and a dream I share, that technology becomes invisible and you only notice it when you need it. He leaves resources, like the Qiskit textbook, for anyone who wants to start right now.