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IF THE 1970s was the dawn of the information age, we may look back on the 2020s as the start of an era driven by quantum computing. It might also be remembered as the time when organizations succeeded-or failed-in preparing for a paradigm shift in computing.
The power of quantum computing has the potential to lead to major advances in healthcare, aerospace and defense, chemicals, information technology, and pharmaceuticals. A recent article in Tech Monitor says the earliest widespread adopters could be banks, which are exploring ways it can revolutionize fraud detection and derivatives pricing.
"Quantum computing will be able to perform calculations that are simply impossible to tackle with any device created up to this point," said Mauro F. Guillén, Dean of the Cambridge Judge Business School at the University of Cambridge. "Quantum's potential is almost impossible to imagine."
Also hard to grasp: The science that will power quantum computing. Consider the phenomenon of quantum entanglement-in which paired particles act in a correlated way regardless of how far apart they are. (More on that later.) Or the key principle of superposition, which left Schrödingers Cat simultaneously alive and in need of another of its nine lives in a famous thought experiment.
Luckily, board members will not be called on to explain such mindboggling matters. But they will need to understand and appreciate quantum computing, which has the potential to create enormous opportunities and risk. Whether a business thrives in the future may very well depend on its readiness for what lies ahead, a recent paper by Ernst & Young says.
This article provides a quick-and hopefully not too technical-primer on quantum computing, a look at how it could affect information security and banking, and questions bank directors should be pursuing as the quantum era approaches.
A Quantum Computing Primer
Perhaps the most important thing to know is that quantum computing is not just a faster version of classical computing. It is fundamentally different. It is a type of computation whose operations are able to harness the phenomena of quantum mechanics-the behavior of energy and material at the molecular and atomic levels. Quantum computers involve millions or billions of computations conducted simultaneously at significantly accelerated speeds.
While today's computers encode information in bits that have...