We have heard about the advent of quantum computing since some years or decades. With some seemingly real quantum computers around the corner (Google's D-Wave, IBM quantum experience), what are the prospects of quantum bioinformatics? Which are the fields in bioinformatics that would profit most from quantum computation?
Just yesterday IBM has released what they call IBM quantum experience, a cloud service that provides interested users access to 5 (real?) qbits. I am eager to try this out, but which toy bioinformatics problem (if any) can be tackled with 5 qbits?
Given that my understanding is right, these states would be able to encode 2.5 nucleotides, and then, using Grover's algorithm, I could find the 'A' in 'AT' with always 1 2-qbit lookup instead of having to look at all bits?
This feels like I had just learned how to build and connect a series of NAND gates to build my first arithmetic unit, then asking myself how to use this machine by connecting logic gates directly to solve bioinformatics problems. There are at least two layers of abstraction missing.
"I can tell you exactly how far along our in-house pipeline your data is, but not exactly where it is - or I can tell you exactly where your data is, but not whether it's been through all the necessary pipelines."
From the little I understand about quantum computing, it is only really good for certain types of problems (traveling salesman type problems) where some kind of simulated annealing is used? I don't think it is just a speedier swap-in replacement for traditional cpus.
I guess one usage in bioinformatics would be graph processing like finding optimal paths through an assembly graph.
I don't think the systems are at that level yet, and there is still some controversy in the field about whether D-Wave is really doing quantum computation. The data is apparently a little mixed, although I am certainly no expert. But they apparently aren't getting speed-ups over classical algorithms in many of the work I see reported. Given some of the timelines and breakthroughs I have looked at, you need something like 4 qubits just to do factorization of numbers in the 100's so I'm not sure there is anything practical you can do with that yet.
Thank you for your view Dan. How many qbits would one need to encode one DNA letter, my understanding is that I would still need 2 qbits, as many as normal bits?
Don't we already use quantum bioinformatics?
Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.
Just no spooky action at a distance on the cluster, please.
John and Istvan, I propose we should entangle our pipelines.