Problems quantum computers could help solve

Computers are remarkably good at many tasks — performing calculations and managing spreadsheets are just two familiar examples. However, as we've seen in the previous pages, some problems remain challenging even for the best modern computers. Take the Max-Cut problem, for instance: as the graph size grows, finding exact solutions becomes increasingly difficult. This isn’t just a human limitation — it’s a computational one. In fact, the problem is so complex that classical computers cannot efficiently find optimal solutions as the problem scales. This applies to scenarios like modeling molecules with more atoms, optimizing systems with many parameters, or tackling large-scale machine learning tasks.

A lot of these problems are now handled in supercomputing centers. Explore our blog post on bringing high performance computing and quantum computing together here.

Quantum Advantage

Researchers are now working hard on solving these kinds of problems with a quantum computer to reach something called quantum advantage.

Quantum advantage (sometimes quantum supremacy) refers to the point in time where a quantum computer solves a problem that is well beyond reach for any classical computer, i.e. a classical computer will never be able to solve this problem in a reasonable amount of time.

In 2019 researchers from Google conducted an experiment showing quantum advantage . The experiment showed that a quantum computer can outperform a classical computer in producing random numbers – a certain task that was tailored to a quantum computer. While this is a very interesting research result, the impact for businesses is limited as the problem solved has no practical use.

Due to the enormous potential of quantum computing to tackle some of the hardest challenges we face as humanity such as drug development or climate change, many companies already prepare for a quantum future and have started building in-house quantum computing expertise. With experts expecting wide-spread use of quantum computers by the year 2030 (see McKinsey study), many companies and teams are asking how they can start preparing to be among the first to profit from this new technology. With our IQM use-case discovery workshop, we can offer you a structured process of identifying and evaluating potential use-cases in your field (reach out to us at info@meetiqm.com).