“All computers built to date are called classical because they are governed by the laws of classical physics. A quantum computer, on the other hand, encodes information in very small objects, such as atoms, photons or molecules.” Simone Severini, Quantum Computing Director for Amazon Web Services, explains to the audience of Italian Tech Week the operation and prospects of quantum computers, which are still under development today but which promise great developments in the future. Extracting an enlarged model of a caffeine molecule, Severini explained that “if we wanted to study the behavior of this molecule with a classical computer, it would have to be as large as the planet Earth, so much information is inside”. On the contrary, “if we encode the molecule in a quantum computer we will be able to understand how it works, because we will have a kind of copy of this object in the computer”. Hence Severino’s conclusion: “The quantum computer connects us to quantum physics and is a sort of telescope. Just as the telescope makes us look further, the quantum computer allows us to calculate much more complex things, such as behavior of molecules “
By Giulia Destefanis and Andrea Lattanzi