An Outlook for Quantum Computing [Point of View]

We have ubiquitous presence of computers today, ranging from simple controllers in modern appliances to smartphones in our pockets that provide a wide range of everyday services, to powerful supercomputers and large data centers that carry out the most computationally intensive tasks. These computational machines have a few things in common: for example, the information they handle is stored in bits (0 or 1), and the procedure for processing the information is specified by a program. A great deal is known about the limits of what such computational machines can and cannot do efficiently. There are many important computational problems that are believed to be very difficult to solve using even the most powerful computers, where the resource requirement-whether it is the size of the machine or the time it takes to finish the task-increases exponentially as a function of the problem size.