Quantum computing: from Intel to IBM and Google, the companies bringing about the quantum age

Quantum computing is quickly shifting from purely theoretical to actual practical processors. And inside those chips reside qubits: particles that could change the way we compute on a grand scale. While we’re not quite at the ‘quantum supremacy’ tipping point just yet, universities, researchers, and Silicon Valley companies are all entangled in quantum fever. But just how close are we to that quantum computing inflection point and who are the boffins trying to get us there? Utilising Quantum bits, or qubits, these complex computers exist outside the binary world of technology we know today. The parallel, interconnected power of qubits could one day revolutionise pharmaceutical research, material and chemical modelling, AI, cryptography, financial systems, and help humankind explore and understand the universe. “Can a quantum system be simulated by a classical universal computer? In other words, a computer which will give the same probabilities as the quantum system does,” Richard Feynman, world-renowned theoretical physicist, quantum computing pioneer, and developer of the atomic bomb said at Caltech in 1982 (Int. Journal of Theoretical Phys., Vol. 21, 1982). “If you take the computer to be the classical kind I've described so far, and there are no changes in any laws, and there's no hocus-pocus, the answer is certainly, No!