Finally someone recognising the importance of quantum in this decade! Re:invent 2020 by Dr. Werner Vogels, Vice President and CTO, Amazon:

“It’s especially important in this exploratory time that we let as many people as possible get their hands dirty and their brains wrapped around quantum computing. As companies and institutions begin to experiment with quantum for the first time—and as that expertise starts to move beyond the academic world—we’ll see business plans and the early seeds of products and services that center around a quantum future.”

And great to see the recognition Southeast Asia in the race to the cloud!

I really enjoyed this deep dive session at Re:invent 2020 by Alex Weibel Building post-quantum cryptography for the cloud which framed the problem statement in relation to quantum very well, with quantum computers or not. The NIST standardisation process run on classical computer not quantum computers but based on math that is resistant to quantum computers 

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And this AWS Online Summit ASEAN 2021’s session was great by Michael Brett, Principal Specialist – Amazon Braket, and Joe Fitzsimons, Founder & Chief Executive Officer, Horizon Quantum Computing demonstrating how they take an API approach to enable their customers/partners to develop quantum applications: A sneak peek into the future with Quantum Computing (On-demand video)

The promise of quantum computers by TED@BCG has a great analogy for quantum vs traditional computers:

“Identifying the disease pathway in the body is a lot [of compute]. But designing a drug requires searching through a massive chemical space, effectively a maze of molecular structures to find the right compound, to find a key that fits the lock. The problem is that tracing the entire relevant span of chemical space and converting it into a searchable database for drug design would take 5 trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion years on the world’s fastest super computer. On a quantum computer, a little more than half-hour.”

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HBR asked a very timely and valid question: Are You Ready for the Quantum Computing Revolution?

“A particularly important application of quantum computers might be to simulate and analyze molecules for drug development and materials design. A quantum computer is uniquely suited for such tasks because it would operate on the same laws of quantum physics as the molecules it is simulating.”

Really liked article going back to basics on quantum: “Quantum physics has already changed our lives. Thanks to the invention of the laser and the transistor — both products of quantum theory — almost every electronic device we use today is an example of quantum physics in action. We may now be on the brink of a second quantum revolution as we attempt to harness even more of the power of the quantum world. 
Although quantum theory is over a century old, the current quantum revolution is based on the more recent realization that uncertainty — a fundamental property of quantum particles — can be a powerful resource. At the level of individual quantum particles, such as electrons or photons (particles of light), it’s impossible to precisely know every property of the particle at any given moment in time.“

I love that uncertainty is at the heart of quantum theory and “that quantum uncertainty — a fuzzy in-between “superposition” of 0 and 1 — is actually not a bug, but a feature.” “two qubits can be locked together in such a way that individually they remain undetermined, but jointly they are perfectly in sync — either both qubits are 0 or both are 1. This combination of joint certainty and individual unpredictability — a phenomenon called entanglement — is a powerful fuel that drives many quantum computing algorithms.” 

And I want to live long enough to witness quantum teleportation!

And HBR’s Exponential view enlighten us on Building a quantum computer with light with a photon based approach instead of matter based approach 💡