well this past week we saw a Quantum Leap that could rewrite Computer History Google's Willow chip is touted as not just another technology breakthrough but an evolution in the way we solve some of the world's toughest challenges in under five minutes the chip can solve a problem that would take today's most powerful computers 10 septian years that's longer than the age of our universe it's a technology that could transform everything from AI cyber security scientific research to even Financial strategies meanwhile Canada is in a unique position to capitalize on this developing technology for more on
this we're speaking to McKelly mosa co-founder of the institute for Quantum Computing at the University of waterl and CEO of evolution Q McKelly thanks very much for joining us on the program today hi Linda great to be here I'm glad you're here uh and I'm hoping that you can explain for all of us who don't know this stuff inside out like you do what is quantum Computing and why is Willow such a GameChanger Quantum Computing is what you get when you evolve today's Computing platforms to also take advantage of quantum mechanical rules quantum mechanical rules
they're invented over 100 years ago to try to explain some phenomena that seemed impossible right and then we understood a more fundamental phenomena some knob sort of under the hood that explained these previously impossible things but over the past Century we've built technologies that can control matter and information at the quantum mechanical levels so we can kind of engineer them to do previously impossible things that we want to do so instead of just observing some effects we can actually start creating effects and results that would otherwise have been impossible and so when you build a
computer out of quantum mechanical bits in regular computers take information encode it into zeros and ones that we call bits manipulate them and get do something with the answer a Quantum bit somehow embodies zero and one at the same time this extra complexity is also an opportunity and if we can encode certain problems and manipulate them using Quantum bits we can solve them with astronomically fewer steps so it's not what faster clock speeds is about just reducing the number of operations required uh the big wakeup call for us was over 30 years ago where for
example certain codes that protect the internet today it's supposed to take trillions of years to break those codes on a regular computer but on a quantum computer you can do with many many fewer steps that you can do in a few hours maybe even minutes and so the name of the game now is what are useful things we can do with these computers but of course to truly harness the power of of quantum computers because it was an idea over 30 years ago we need to correct for errors because even if you have an error
rate of one and a thousand that means you can only do a few thousand operations before you're almost certainly going to have a mistake and that the answer will be wrong and useless right so there's this whole game of quantum ER correction otherwise we're we're stuck with just a few hundred Gates or so few hundred so just to step back today's processors they do billions of operations per second right and today we could only get away with a few hundred Quantum operations in order to get beyond that you need error correction and that's where Willow
comes in really takes us into this new era of quantum error correction and so Willow cuts down on the number of Errors um and that's exciting for all the reasons there that you explained can you explain just how we might use this in the real world yeah so to use it in the real world it's kind of like asking uh you know in the 1950s what are regular computers of the day going to be used for and back then they were used to simulate nuclear reactions and to break codes right it took years to figure
out people weren't looking for computation to solve their problems because it didn't really exist for most of them but now we're in this new era where we're just at the cus and again Google's results which take air correction from an idea to something that can actually Implement in devices lower the error rates and be able to implement many more operations much larger computations now we're starting to see or you know companies government departments try to figure out which which sectors of our economy would be greatly impacted by this computing power and we have ideas of
where it could impact such as energy with new materials to capture and transport energy Healthcare and other sectors but now we're just starting the game of well build up the game let's say of understanding which economic sectors would be enhanced and disrupted in a positive way by Quantum Computing Technologies and we said Canada is in a unique position to capitalize on this they have National Quantum strategy to facilitate research and development but are we doing enough and and what are the potential economic impacts of quantum Computing that has so many nations looking at furthering this
technology well we're doing a lot we've done a lot but no it's not enough um we need to evolve and this is a challenge around the world we're not the only ones struggling with this but those who figure it out faster and better will will certainly reap the benefits of this we need to go from research to development to really operationalizing and using these Technologies these are different games when you want to operationalize with different players so really we really need to get them into the fold and engage with them to figure out how this
will impact well a few things how this will impact the critical parts of the Canadian economy because disruption is great for the disruptors we don't want to lose our current jobs we want to augment our current jobs and then there's also this new Quantum sector emerging we obviously want to be big players in there these two are synergistic because to benefit from Quantum Advantage you need to have access to the technology and the best way to get your seat at the table you know having access to the technology is to be a big part of
producing and exporting the technology around the world so our policies they need to be fast this is is no longer a science project and that's a really hard idea to get across to people and we need this is not a question of how many budget Cycles later how many you know election Cycles later this is how many months and quarters uh how quickly can we move because the world is moving very rapidly here and we thank you for explaining it for us it's a pleasure that's Melly mosa co-founder of the institute for Quantum Computing at
the University of watero [Music]
