Xanadu CEO on the high-stakes race to create the world’s first scalable quantum computer in Canada

The potential impact Christian Weedbrook mentions on pharmaceuticals is kind of fascinating. "Right now, designing new drugs – from computational simulations to phased trials to ultimately selling tablets – can take 10 years and up to $2 billion. Ninety per cent of drug candidates fail because we still can’t reliably predict how a molecule will behave in the body before we make it. Molecules are governed by quantum interactions that don’t break down into independent pieces – the electrons are entangled, so changing one affects the others. Classical computers can only approximate these interactions, and those approximations get less accurate as molecules grow more complex. Quantum computers, by contrast, simulate molecular behaviour natively rather than approximating. That’s why we think it shifts the odds across the whole discovery pipeline." submitted by /u/pd902011 [link] [comments]