Today’s major companies (IBM, Google, Microsoft) are racing towards building a fully functioning quantum computer. Quantum technology has gained so much attention in recent years, even though quantum computing’s origins go back to the early 1980s.
This major attention has led companies and universities to build and develop resources for those curious to get into the quantum realm. Moreover, those curious souls have formed groups on different platforms to share knowledge and support each other in their learning journey.
As a person who recently joined the field (about two years ago), I can assure you that now — despite everything else — is the absolute best time for you to join this exciting, rapidly developed field.
In this article, I will give the four reasons why I think that now is the best time to jump in and start your quantum journey.
Let’s get right to it.
The Current Stage of the Field
Quantum technology is not a new field. The recent attention in the media and the different companies may have made it seem that way, but the truth is the development of quantum computing started sometime around the early 1980s.
Since then, the field has come a long way. Today, you can use Python to program an actual quantum computer and get some results back.
Yes, the results won’t be very accurate because the hardware’s current stage is very faulty, but the fact that you can get results moves the field from theory to practice. This is a very encouraging fact to start programming and running codes on actual quantum hardware.
In 2017, IBM released the Python library Qiskit (Quantum Information Science Kit). This library allows you to write Python code that can be executed on one of IBM’s machines on the cloud. This means you can implement many popular quantum algorithms, such as Shor and Grover, for real-life applications and test them on the simulator provided by Qiskit as well.
In addition to programming language add-ons, there has been a lot of effort devoted to developing quantum circuit simulators that allow you to build actual circuits without the need to write any code.
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