Quantum Computing: The Development, The Field, The Companies, and Domain Names

This week Google announced major progress in the field of quantum computing. Hartmut Neven, the founder of Google Quantum Ai, wrote about the development in the blog article Meet Willow, our state-of-the-art quantum chip.

I decided this was an opportune time to take a look at the field of quantum computing, including names chosen by some of the major and emerging companies, and statistics on domain names related to the field.

Qubit Is The Unit of Quantum Computing

Traditional digital computing at a fundamental level operates on bits, which have one of two states, usually represented by 0 and 1. In electronics, those bits are represented by a quantity, such as charge state or voltage level.

One can apply logic to numbers represented in bit form. For example, a two-input digital AND gate will produce an output of 1 only if both input A AND input B are in the 1 state. There are various other logic gates, and they can be assembled in combinations to logically process information. Digital computing as we currently have it uses massive networks of logic and sequences of processing to solve problems.

The unit of quantum computing is the qubit (also called the quantum bit, or sometimes the qbit). So what is that all about?

We have to talk about light and a cat before we get to that.

Light is Both a Particle and a Wave

You probably don’t think much about the light you are using to read this, or the photons travelling down the optical fibre providing your internet connection, but light is pretty amazing. Perhaps the most amazing thing about light is that it acts as both a particle and a wave, at the same time!

If I shine light on two tiny openings close together, it will produce an interference pattern on a screen. This is because light acts like a wave, and waves, such as ripples in a pond, act that way, they interfere. It’s not like light goes through one slit or the other, it partly goes through both slits.

But if I make a super sensitive detector that can detect the smallest units of light, it does not detect continuously, as you would expect for a wave, but rather in tiny packets. These packets are called photons, the tiniest bit of light possible. Light acts like a particle when we detect its presence, but as a wave when it interferes.

Matter Too has Both Particle and Wave Properties

In 1975, I was studying for a massively stressful oral examination. In preparation, I read a lot of things, and one of them is what I still regard as one of the most interesting things I have ever read. The late, great physicist Richard Feynman delivered a series of lectures on physics, and possibly the most fascinating one is about quantum behavior. You can read what I read in 1975 at this link. Or I summarize the key ideas below.

Richard Feynman used thought experiments, things you could not do exactly, but other experiments that you could perform gave you confidence in predicting what would happen in the simplified thought experiment. He first talks about light acting as a wave, and interfering, and a light detector, that showed light arrived in packets, or photons, like we talked about above. He also talked about an experiment with objects, he used idea of a gun spraying bullets but it could be anything. They act like particles, not like waves.

But then he imagined doing the same experiment with tiny particles, electrons, You fired the beam of electrons at two thin slightly separated slits, or openings, and then looked on a screen when the electrons hit. The electrons always arrived one or none, that is they acted like particles. But the pattern of arrival of electrons was a fluctuating intensity pattern, just like a wave would produce.

It turns out that matter, just like light, at a small enough scale, acts both like a particle and as a wave, at the same time. But we can only observe that at a very small scale, that’s why the ideas of quantum seem strange from our everyday perspective.

Therefore to truly understand matter, at a small scale, we need to include looking at its wave properties, and interference patterns, and that is one part of what quantum mechanics is all about.

I’m waiting for that cat, you say…

Schrodinger’s Cat

Now jumping ahead, when we get to actual quantum computing, the idea of quantum superposition is important. Another great physicist, Erwin Schrödinger, was one of the pioneers of quantum mechanics including superpostion ideas. In 1935, Schrödinger suggested a thought experiment to help describe one of the most surprising aspects of quantum mechanics.

It turns out that once you observe something, it has to be in one state or the other, and the interference (wavelike) effects disappear. But until then, it exhibits wave properties that can be partly one thing and partly the other. I know, that is weird. But countless experiments have validated it.

In the Schrödinger’s cat experiment, a cat is in a closed chamber with a radioactive source of particles, that will be randomly emitted, and a detector that will respond when a radioactive particle is emitted. That detector is in turn connected to a vial with poison that will open and kill the poor cat after detection of the radioactive emission. Remember, this is only a thought experiment, no cats are actually harmed.

If no one observes, the cat is a mixture of partly alive and partly dead. But if someone looks, the cat is actually either alive or dead, and the quantum superposition no longer holds. It turns out at a small scale the world is like that. Weird, huh?

But what does that have to do with quantum computing?

Qubits and Quantum Computing

The tiniest unit in quantum computing is the qubit. But in quantum, at a tiny enough level, remember that things have both wave and particle properties, and can interfere. The qubit is like that, it is not like the bit with just 0 and 1 logic level possibilities, but rather has a whole set of probabilities, that can interfere with other qubits.

But, as for the cat, once we actually probe the qubit for an answer, it is indeed 0 or 1 output. So what is the big deal? Well until we measure, or observe, the qubit state, it is a superposition of many possibilities.

The best analogy for how qubits are applied in quantum computing I read somewhere, sorry I forget where, was this. Imagine a computer solving a really super complex maze, that is determining the correct path through. A conventional computer can solve that, but it will do it by brute force, simply try path after path, one at a time. With a very large and complex maze, it can take a long time. Of course we could use parallel digital processing to speed up the task.

The quantum computer, though, using qubits, can have an approach, due to the nature of the qubit and interactions, that is a little like sniffing many possible paths all simultaneously, and solving the maze problem more quickly. But sometimes it gets it wrong, and that is what the Google breakthrough was about, errors.

I left out a lot about quantum computing, but check out the very readable article What Is Quantum Computing? by IBM, if you want to delve a little deeper. It covers how the qubits are created, how the processing is done, and a bit about the potential of quantum computing.

Jeffrey Scholz of RareSkills.io did a nice background thread on X that includes a crash course in quantum computing.

What Was Announced by Google

While in a sense quantum computing has been around many decades, to actually achieve a useful quantum computer is tough. One of the biggest problems, is that to do something meaningful you need to produce bigger quantum logic networks to process the qubits, and the quantum computer was already noisy, and rapidly got more noise as the network got bigger. In other words it produced the wrong results quite often.

You can read a pretty detailed overview of the development in Meet Willow, our state-of-the-art quantum chip.. The key point is that they were able to make the noise go down as the qubit logic array size went up, a big step toward feasible quantum computing.

The announcement this week coincided with publication the same day of their paper in the prestigious scientific journal Nature. If you want to read the actual paper, it is at this link, but unless you have an academic institution account, there is a paywall. However, many scientists publish an almost complete version of their paper on an open preprint server at arxiv.org and run from Cornell University. That helps other scientists build on current results from others, without waiting for the final version of the paper to publish. This paper was posted on the preprint server in August 2024, and anyone can without cost read the preprint Quantum error correction below the surface code threshold.

In case you are not impressed, Google Quantum AI used the new quantum chip, Willow, to solve a test problem in about 5 minutes. It is anticipated the world’s current fastest supercomputer would require about 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years to solve the same problem. That is way, way more than the age of the universe. In other words, quantum computing will be able to solve problems, and in particular perform complex simulations, that are currently impossible.

Scientific American wrote a nice article on the Google work as well as the field more generally, Google Makes a Major Quantum Computing Breakthrough.

But let’s get to some names…

Sales Involving Quantum Computing Terms

I first used NameBio to look for major sales involving terms related to quantum computing. Here are a few that I found:

• I first looked for sales of the exact term quantum, and the largest sale was quantum.xyz that sold for $199,000 this year. The .co sold for $25,000 by @Nikul Sanghvi at Hypernames in 2017. NameBio show 9 other smaller exact term sales.
• I looked for QuantumComputer, and found nothing other than the plural that sold for wholesale in 2009. QuantumComputing.com sold for $30,000 in 2017, and QuantumIntelligence for $14,169 at NameJet in 2021.
• I next looked for sales of qubit, and @Nikul Sanghvi sale of the .co for $19,000 in 2018 was the top sale, followed by a low 5-figure sale of the .ai at Dynadot this year.
• There were 8 sales of the alternate spelling qbit, with the top being the .com that sold for just over $8100 at Sedo in 2015.
• There are a few sales of quanta, including a $5000 sale of the .gg last year.

Quantum Company Names

I did not do a rigorous analysis, but browsed several listings of quantum computing names. TheQuantumInsider has a good list Quantum Computing Companies: A Full 2024 List.

Many companies at the top of the list are well-known, such as Google AI, IBM, Microsoft, NVIDIA, AWS, Intel, and Alibaba Group, all of which have strong quantum computing divisions.

Other companies on the list include 1QBit, Agnostiq, Aliro, Algorithmiq, Baidu, Alice&Bob, ANYON, Atom Computing, BEIT, Bleximo, BosonQ Psi, ClassiQ, D-Wave, diraq (derived from a famous quantum scientist Dirac), EeroQ, Entropica Labs, Eviden, Infleqtion, IQM, IONQ, JIJ, Kuano, Kvantify, Multiverse Computing, NordQuantique, Orca Computing, Oxford Ionics, PasQal, Phasecraft, Photonic, PlanQC, PolarisQB, ProteinQure, Q-CTRL, Quantastica, QCWare, QILIMANJARO, Quera, Quandela, Quantinuum, QuantrolOx, QunaSys, Rigetti Computing, RiverLande, SandboxAQ, SeeQC, StrangeWorks, TuringQ, Xanadu and Zapata AI. I noticed that many of the made-up, or creatively-spelled, names incorporate a Q in the name.

Slightly less than half use the term ‘quantum’ in their name, but many do

, or a close form, such as AQT (Alpine Quantum Technologies), A Star Quantum, C12 Quantum Electronics, Horizon Quantum Computing, HQS Quantum Simulations, Origin Quantum, OQC, Oxford Quantum Circuits, PsiQuantum, Quantum Computing Incorporated, Quantum Brilliance, Quantum Circuits, Quantum Generative Materials, Quantum Machines, Quantum Motion, Quantware, Quantum Source, Qubit Pharmaceuticals, QuixQuantum, Silicon Quantum Computing, Terra Quantum, and Universal Quantum.

It is much more common to use ‘quantum’ than ‘computer’ or ‘computing’, or ‘qubit’ in the name. Also, in general ’quantum’ is more likely the first part of the name, although some have it at the end.

Registered Domains

I used dotDB to look at how many exact and total registrations in some of the key terms. I used OpenCorporates to look at the number of active registered businesses and organizations for each term.

Exact TLDs column gives the number extensions the term is currently registered in, while total is the number of registered domain names that include that term, including longer names. The data is from dotDB. The aOCs column gives the number of active companies and organizations use that name, or in a former name, with data from OpenCorporates.​

Quantum Discussion at NamePros

There have been several discussions related to quantum names on NamePros, including:

• Quantum Computing Showcase and Discussion started by @Pusang Gala
• Quantum related domains – showcase, sales, talk, etc. started by @alcy.

Quantum computing has also come into various other discussions, including this reference to the future possibility of AES encryption being broken by quantum computers.

ICANN published a report Quantum Computing and the DNS. @Lox started a NamePros discussion thread related to that topic.

What Will Quantum Computing Do Well?

Quantum computing will find application where massive computing resources are required, but certain problems seem particularly suited to quantum computing approaches. In particular, simulations that are large with a huge number of possible interactions. One of these will be biotech and medical research. Several of the companies in the Quantum Computing Companies: A Full 2024 List are in this niche.

The Microsoft quantum computing site says:

The site goes on to point out that quantum computing approaches are particular relevant to situations requiring large numbers of combinations.

Not Yet

I did not want to leave you with the false impression that we are on the verge of commercial feasibility in quantum computing. This article has a nice summary of some of the challenges that remain for quantum computing: What Are The Remaining Challenges Of Quantum Computing?. Note that it was written prior to the recent Google paper on the error correction progress.

While investment is quantum computing is ramping up strongly, probably more than 30% annual growth rate according to various estimates, we are still in early stages. There is a significant charge for the full market report, but the online overview of the quantum computing market provides interesting insights.

What Naming Problem Could A Quantum Computer Solve?

What about in the field of brands, naming and domain names – What is one application for a quantum computer that is impossible with current technology. I hope readers will share their creative proposals. Also feel free to comment more generally on quantum computing and the potential for domain names in this sector. I have one idea, but want to hear your ideas first.

By the way, if any readers want to study this topic at a much deeper level, Google is offering through Coursera an online course on Hands-on quantum error correction with Google Quantum AI. The course is free to sign up, as I understand it, is aimed at a first-year university level, has flexible scheduling, and starts today, Dec. 12, 2024. There are currently just under 5000 students enrolled.