All great things end.

The invincible Moore’s law, which states that the numbers of transistors on a silicon chip doubles every two years, is slowing down. It will eventually come to a halt. This is because current microchips have become so compact that the thinnest layer of transistors is around twenty atoms across. When this reaches to about five atoms across, the quantum rules start to act and location of the electron can become uncertain. They can also leak or short-circuit the microchip or generate such heat so as to melt the chip. If we continue to use Silicon as the base substrate, the Moore’s law will eventually collapse and the golden age of Silicon may sooner or later become an obituary.

So, what is next?

The next thing in line is the proverbial post Silicon age or the “Quantum Age “. The superstar product of this age will be a Quantum Computer.

In our current computers (classical computers), information is of a digital format and the smallest unit of information is called a bit. This digital information can be encoded in a series of 0s or 1s. This 0 or 1 is fed in a processor which performs the calculation and creates and output. Hence the 0 or 1 is the only possible state in the digital computer and there is a limitation to the multiplicity of more states or the in-between states. The famous physicist, Richard Feynman, in 1959, proposed a new approach to digital computing in his essay “There is plenty of room at the bottom”. The summary of his essay was why we cannot replace the sequence of 0s and 1s with the states of the atom, thus, giving the birth to an atomic computer or a Quantum computer.

In physics a Quantum is the minimum amount of any physical entity involved in an interaction. Hence quantum applies to the microworld of the particles that makes the material and matter around us. The rules of the subatomic world are not easy to understand as they are not deterministic but probabilistic. So, an atom could be spinning up 20% of the time and spinning down 80% of the time.  Or it can spin up 60% of the time and spin down 40% of the time. Hence there are infinite ways in which an atom can spin and hence the probability of states also becomes infinite. This means that that atom can carry much more information than a classical bit and in Quantum computing this bit becomes a qubit. The qubit represents the multiple states that an atom or a sub-atomic particle can have at the same time. This property of a particle to have multiple states at the same time is called Superposition. Superposition means that sub-atomic particles like electrons can be in two places at the same place which is not true for larger objects. So, it is not more 0 or 1 but it can be 0 and 1 at the same time or anything between 0 and 1 at the same time. Superposition enables the computer to have exponential power of processing. Unsolvable mathematical theorems which can take hundreds of years to get simulated on our current digital computers will get simulated on a Quantum computer in seconds. On top of this, the qubits can interact with each other regardless of the distance which is not possible for classical bits. This property is called Entanglement. This property ensures that information associated with a particle get communicated to other entangled particle regardless of the distance. Hence Quantum computers have exponential capacity to process information. While traditional computers process in a linear way (step by step), the quantum computers handle multiple calculations in parallel making them exponentially faster for tasks.

Artificial Intelligence or AI is already a big part of our lives even if we may not notice it.  The main strength of AI is to recognize patterns and make decisions based on massive amounts of data. Whether it is recommendation engine on your streaming app, fraud detection in your banking app, analysis of market trends or more complex medical imaging for diagnosis, AI is transforming industries by improving efficiency and accuracy. AI learns from data and it can quickly sift through massive datasets, spotting patterns that would take humans much longer to detect. What makes AI powerful is its ability to “learn” from data. Through machine learning, AI systems can improve over time, making more accurate predictions as they process more information. This adaptability is what makes AI a key tool in solving complex and real-world problems. Currenrly the AI runs on conventional digital computers which have the limitation of 0 or 1 states as we have understood. If we are able to run the AI engines on the Quantum computers of the future, AI can solve the biggest problems that are faced by humanity.  That is the promise of Quantum AI.