The Future of Quantum Computer Advantage

As technological innovations in computers begin to advance past their limit (Moore’s law), a new problem arises: What computational device would emerge after the classical supercomputers reach their physical limitations? At this moment in time, quantum computers are at their starting stage and there are already some strengths and advantages when compared with modern, classical computers. In its testing period, there are a variety of ways to create a quantum computer by processes such as the trapped-ion and the spin-dot methods. Nowadays, there are many drawbacks with quantum computers such as issues with decoherence and scalability, but many of these issues are easily emended. Nevertheless, the benefits of quantum computers at the moment outweigh the potential drawbacks. These benefits include its use of many properties of quantum mechanics such as quantum superposition, entanglement, and parallelism. Using these basic properties of quantum mechanics, quantum computers are capable of achieving faster computational times for certain problems such as finding prime factors of an integer by using Shor’s algorithm. From the advantages such as faster computing times in certain situations and higher computing powers than classical computers, quantum computers have a high probability to be the future of computing after classical computers hit their peak.