Computers today operate with bits of the binary system, ones and zeros which represent what a electrical impulse succeed or fail, and everything you use on your PC, from games to this website, is nothing but long strings of binary digits. On the contrary, how much does a computer use qubits, subatomic particles such as electrons or photons which have the particularity of adding a third state: in addition to the 1 and the 0 of the binary system which means on or off , they have the state of both at the same time through a phenomenon called to ride. This causes the paradigm of software to be able to use hardware to change completely.
The operating system of quantum computers
PC users and in general any type of device like consoles or even smartphones are used to certain operating systems like Microsoft Windows, UNIX, Android or basically other systems based on one of these three (remember that for example MacOS is based on UNIX), and they all work using the binary system.
However, quantum computers cannot work with any of the operating systems that we are familiar with, because as we explained, they work with qubits and not with bits, so your software development should take states into account. additional devices we talked about, and this is one of the reasons (in addition to the cost they have and the technical difficulties to make them work) why their arrival in the family environment is still far away.
Microsoft has already made the first approach with the system LIQUi |>, developed since 2016 as a software architecture for quantum computing. It includes a programming language, optimization and programming algorithms in addition to quantum simulators. This software can be used to translate a quantum algorithm written as a high level program (the visible programs that we run) into low level instructions for a quantum machine.
Keep in mind that LIQUi |> is not an operating system as such, but an interface for simulating and giving instructions to quantum computers. It includes the simulation of circuits up to 30 qubits in a single machine with 32 GB of RAM memory, limited only by memory and CPU threads, and as we said, it can be used as an algorithm translator quantum in the form of a program. high level capable of giving low level instructions to a processor. In other words, it’s nothing more than a quantum computer simulator for a conventional PC.
However, the first true operating system for quantum processors was developed by researchers at the University of Cambridge in 2015, and as you can imagine, it is something completely special and specific to be able to work with qubits and this of course cannot be run on a conventional PC. In 2021, a Chinese startup created “Quantum Origin“A complete operating system that promises to make quantum computers can be used as if they were independent computers, not just a terminal from which to execute computational orders.
Quantum computing continues to advance, but all experts agree that it still has a lot of time and development work to reach its potential, which is seen as the future of computing. As for its arrival in home environments, we continue to move forward with operating systems like Origin Quantum, which are already functional, but the maintenance and error correction problems of these types of systems mean that there are still more at least a century. , to begin to see them in the domestic sphere.
