[Music] from the cube studios in Palo Alto in Boston it's the cube covering the IBM thing brought to you by IBM welcome back everybody you're watching the cube and our continuous coverage of IBM think Digital 20/20 events it's we've been wall-to-wall for a couple days now and and we bring in you all the action a bass fall is here here he is the global league for quantum education and open science at IBM quantum gave great to see you thanks for coming on yeah thanks for having me here Dave you're very welcome love the discussion on quantum but I gotta say so I'm reading your bio in your bio I see quantum algorithms experimental quantum computation nanoscale device fabrication cryogenic measurements and quantum software development hardware programming etc so you're obviously qualified to talk about quantum but but how how can somebody learn about quantum do I have to be like a rocket scientist then understand this stuff so Dave this is one of the things that I'm very passionate about it's also my job to make sure that anyone can learn about quantum computing today so primarily what I'm focused on is making sure that you don't need a PhD to program a quantum computer when I was going through my graduate studies trying to learn quantum computing I needed access to a lab so I have to go to graduate school to do this but in 2016 IBM put a quantum computer on the cloud in that dramatically changes the field it allows access to anyone from the world with just an internet connection to program a quantum computer so the question I'm trying to answer on a daily basis now is the question that you asked how do I learn to program a quantum computer well I'm trying to make several resources available for you to do that okay well let's talk about those resources I mean you have quantum you have access to quantum computers I talked to Jamie Thomas the other day she said that you guys it's all available in the IBM cloud I can't even I can't even imagine what the infrastructure behind that looks like but as a user I don't have to see that so how do I get access to this stuff so there are several quantum computers available on the cloud now and every time I think about this it's fascinating to me because I needed access to a lab to access these things but now you don't you can go to quantum computing dot ibm.com and get free access to several quantum computers now the question becomes if I give you this access to the quantum computers how do you learn to program them the software that you use to program them is called kiss kit just like we've made access to the quantum computers open for everyone our software is also open source you can access it by going to Kiska torgue that's QIS ki t org and if you go in particular to Kiska org slash education we've put together a textbook to help you go through everything that you'd learn in a classroom about quantum algorithms and to start programming the real quantum systems yourself so everything's ready for you to program immediately what was the it can you give me the quantity IBM want them - computing URL again yeah that's quantum - computing IBM com once you create an account there you immediately get access to several quantum computers which is an impressive thing to think about the cryogenics that you mentioned earlier the hardware the software all of it is ready for you to take advantage of but I gotta ask you I know it's sort of off topic here but but if I had to look under the covers I'm gonna see some big cryogenic unit with a bunch of cables coming in is that right that's exactly it very cold inside that's right so the way to here's the way to think about it outer space is about 200 times colder than room temperature and the temperature where the chip the quantum chips it's is another 200 times lower than that so we're talking very cold here we're talking only 15 Mille kelvins above absolute zero that's zero point zero one five degrees above absolute zero so it's a very cold system and you'd have several wires that are going down into this coil system to try to communicate with the quantum ship well and what's exciting to me about this whole thing Abe is it is it brings me back to the sort of the early days of computing and the you know huge rooms and now look where we are today and so I would expect that over the next many decades you're going to see sort of similar advanced advances in quantum and being able to actually execute at somewhat higher temperatures and in miniaturization it's very exciting time and we're really obviously at the very very early innings but I want to ask you just in terms of if if I'm a programmer and I'm a Java programmer can I actually come in and start using quantum if you what do I need to know to get started so you need to know two things the first thing is you need to be familiar with any programming language the easiest programming language to pick up today by far is Python so kiss kit is built based on Python so if you're able to quickly catch up with a few things in Python and we have a chapter dedicated to this topic in our textbook that's the first thing the second thing is simply having the ability to learn something new simply being excited about this field once you have those two together you can learn quantum computing very quickly within a few months the question then becomes catching up with the research and reading research papers that can take some time but for us to be able to talk through a quantum program takes only a few a few days of reading let's talk about what some of the folks are doing with quantum we talked again to Jamie Thomas and she gave me some examples not surprisingly you know you saw for instance some some examples in pharmaceutical and to the other obvious industries but then banking came in it's a but what what is it what are people doing with quantum today maybe you could add some color to that primarily most of the working quantum today is focused on understanding how to take problems in industry whether it is to understand how to simulate molecules whether it is to understand how to optimize a financial portfolio taking those problems and mapping them onto a quantum computer so that they can get solved so you'll see various various industries exploring how to take their problems and map onto a quantum computer so one one exciting one that I'm seeing a lot of progress in is chemistry learning how to simulate molecules using these quantum computers as someone with a physics background for me the exciting thing to see here is also how people are using these quantum computers which fundamentally are taking advantage of quantum mechanics to simulate other quantum systems so to understand nature better by using nature itself so this is another exciting progress that we're seeing in the field so exciting both from industry and from educational and science purpose so obviously it's a fascinating field and people would you say with curiosity it can get excited about it but but let's say I actually want you know some some kind of career in part of I mean what well how would people sort of get involved do you see you know on the horizon that this is gonna be something that is actually gonna be a vocation for you know young folks that want to get involved I could not tell you how challenging it is to find people who have the right combination of quantum computing knowledge and classical programming knowledge so in order to be able to take full advantage of the quantum systems today we need people who understand both the hardware and the software to some level and there is an extreme shortage of that kind of talent so the work that I'm focused on is exactly this problem of solving the workforce development problem so we're trying to make sure that people have access to anything that they need in order to be able to program a quantum computer and to learn how to then map their own problems into these quantum computers in the future the question becomes let's say we now understand how to use quantum computers to make financial portfolio optimization every bank in the world is going to want someone to implement this in their systems which immediately creates lots of jobs so this is going to become something that's in demand once it becomes possible on a on a large quantum computer so today is the right time to learn how to work with these quantum systems so that when the time comes that there are industries that are needing quantum skills you're ready to be hired for those positions okay so big skills gap you kind of gave an example in financial services where maybe some of the other things that you hope that that people are going to be able to do over time with these skills I cannot under I cannot over us overstate how important it is to learn how to simulate chemistry problems on these quantum computers that will have impacts anywhere ranging from whether it's drug design whether it's making better efficient solar panels more efficient batteries there are many applications where you'll see impact from these so the there are many industries that can benefit from understanding how to work with quantum computers that's something exciting I'm looking forward to see you know you read in the press that you know we're at least a decade away you know from from quantum being a reality but you're giving some examples where it's sort of here today I feel like it's going to come in layers you know not gonna be one big bang it's gonna come over time but but maybe you could you know frame that for us in terms of how you see this market developing I don't even want to call it a market but just this technology developing into a market what what has to take place and what kind of things can we expect along that journey sure so I think it's very important to keep in mind that quantum computers are fairly young technology so we're improving the technology as we go and there has been dramatic improvement in the technology itself but we're still learning as we go so one of the things that you'll find is that all of the applications work that's being done today is exploring how to take advantage of the quantum computer in some way if I immediately gave you a fully functional perfect quantum computer today you wouldn't even know what to do with it right you need to understand how to map problems on to that quantum computer so in preparation for that time several years away you'll see a lot of people trying to learn how to take advantage of quantum computers today and as they get better and better learning how to take advantage of whatever incremental progress is being made so as much as it seems like quantum computers are several years away many people are learning how to program them today just in preparation for that time when they're ready for use and my understanding is we're gonna get there with you know hybrid models today you're using you know traditional microprocessor technology to sort of read and write data from quantum that's likely going to continue for quite some time maybe maybe indefinitely but but but perhaps not right so Dave the important thing to remember is that a quantum computer works jointly with a classical computer if you ask me the question of how do i optimize my portfolio the numbers that I would need to compute with our classical there's nothing quantum about them these are numbers so there's classical information that you then have to take and map on to the quantum computer and then once the quantum computer is done you have to take the data out of that computer and then turn it back into classical information so you'll always have a quantum computer working jointly with a classical computer the question now is how do you make those two work together so that you can extract some benefit that you couldn't have attained with just the classic what do you see is the big sort of technical challenges that you're paying attention to you paying attention to I mean is it getting more you know qubits is a coherence working at higher temperatures what are the things that you see is as the the scientists are working on to move things forward so one of the things that I can do immediately Dave if you and I agreed right now is we can go to the lab and take a quantum chip and put a thousand cubits on that quantum chip that's fine we can do that immediately the problem that you'll find is that it doesn't matter that you have a thousand cubits if the qubits are not good quality cuteness so the technology should focus on improving the fundamental qualities of the qubits themselves before scaling them up to larger numbers in addition to that as you're scaling to larger and larger numbers new problems come into the picture so making better qubits scaling up seeing how the technology is doing learning new things and then scaling farther up that seems to be the model that's working today so in addition to monitoring the quality of the qubits themselves I'm monitoring within the technology how people are implementing solutions to scaling problems in addition to that another important problem that deserves a lot of attention is the question of how do you make good software that can take problems and map them onto quantum computers in in quantum computing when I say I'm running upon a program really what I'm doing is building a quantum circuit and then running that quantum circuit on the real device well if that circuit has certain operations in it maybe you want to tailor the way you transfer that circuit onto the device in a way that takes full advantage of the device itself but then in order to do that you need to write good software so improvements in the software along with improvements in the quantum technology itself will be how we get to success and at IBM we're focused on finding a metric that wraps all of these things together and it's called quantum volume and we're seeing improvements in the quantum volume of our systems as we go yeah Jamie talked about that you're essentially taking the key metrics and putting them into a you know a single observable metric that obviously you can track over time so I want to ask you about security a lot of people are concerned that the quantum is just going to blow away everything that we know cryptography and all the you know the the passwords and security systems that we we've put in place is that a legitimate concern will quantum you both get us into that problem and take us out of that that problem I wonder if you could talk about that so there are two ways to think about this problem one is just fundamentally if you ask me what does it take to put the the cryptography that has our bank accounts safe over the internet connections that we use it takes roughly about a thousand good cubits okay if I tell you a thousand good cubits that doesn't seem like a lot of work but when you think about it what it really requires is an overhead of about a thousand cubits for each qubit that we have today so the numbers of qubits that you need are in the millions in order to put the the kind of cryptography that we're using today at stake so certainly there's a long way to go that's one aspect of the story the other aspect of the story is that we should never underestimate the progress of technology so even though the time when we can use Shor's algorithm which is the algorithm that can be used to break the cryptographic algorithms like RSA even though that's several years away you still want to be ready for that time and what that means is if you have sensitive information today you need to be making sure that that information itself is protected with quantum resistant cryptographic techniques so that when the time comes you can't use a quantum computer to get back the data from today and break so two perspectives one is we're quite a while away from this kind of danger but at the same time it doesn't mean we should be complacent today we should be taking preparations make sure that our critical information is protected yeah that's so that that makes a lot of sense but when you say we're a ways away or we are we decades away we years away we can you and you quantify that in any reasonable way it's hard to speculate on that number so I'll refrain from giving you a specific timeline just to give you an idea the quantum bits that were in development ten years ago had a coherence time so the amount of time that they can store the quantum information of roughly a hundred times smaller than they are today and ten years ago if you asked people how do we get to a hundred times better qubits nobody would have been able to give you a clear answer you could have guessed some ways but nobody would have been able to tell you we'll get there in ten years but we did so instead of coming up with estimates of timelines that depend on what we know today it's probably a better idea to monitor the technology as it goes and keep adapting we're probably talking this century where we're talking to the century hopefully it is my last mission to enable enough people to learn quantum such that it happens within my life very exciting field a I can't thank you enough for helping us educate the audience and and my and myself personally really I'm I'm so fascinated by this it's something that you know jumper and I and the team have been really focused on and I think it's really time to your point the start digging and start learning you've given us some resources there give us give them give us those two reasons one more time there's there's the IBM site and the the the the the queue kit site use that site what are those again just those to wrap so you can access the quantum computers at quantum - computing ibm.com and once you're there the way to learn how to program these quantum computers is by using kiss kit which you can learn about by going to kiss kit org slash education once here at that education page you can access our textbook which we make open-source it's a textbook that's co-written with professors in the field and is open source so it's continually getting updated you can access that textbook at tisket org slash textbook if you go to our youtube channel you'll find several videos that allow you to also learn very quickly so kiss gets YouTube channel is another great place to look so lots of resources and that's kiss kit with a Q which is why I wrote it that way so alright exact thanks so much it was great to see you stay safe and next time hopefully we'll see you face-to-face and you can draw some some cool pictures to help me understand this even better Dave it was nice talking with you I look forward to learning quantum programming with you yeah Cheers and thank you for watching everybody this is the cubes coverage of the IBM think 2020 digital event experience we'll be right back Brennan for this short break [Music] you