By George Nott2021-05-21T13:39:00+01:00
From delivery routes to world hunger, can cutting-edge quantum technology help solve the biggest challenges in food and drink?
Spooky action at a distance” is how Albert Einstein described quantum entanglement, one of the strange phenomena of particle physics that, years after his assessment, is now forming the basis for an entirely new form of computing.
It’s a far more complex iteration of the computers we use today, which represent information in binary bits – for example, on/off, 0/1. A quantum computer uses entangled quantum bits (or qubits) which can be both on and off at the same time – another spooky quality, known as ‘superposition’. That means many computations can be performed in parallel. When fully realised, that quality will give quantum computers a huge speed advantage over ‘classical’ computers in solving certain problems.