by Isabella Goetting, ComSciCon-Triangle 2022

Imagine a pervasive disease is consuming the world, with the molecular design of a cure only one click of a computer program away. Just one problem: it will take hundreds, if not thousands or even millions, of years for the program to run. Thankfully, scientists are working on a solution that could not only speed up computer simulations to design new medicines, but also address other problems that require a large amount of computational power (think of cracking security codes, sorting databases, etc.). A completely new type of computer, called “quantum computers,” offers this solution.