I Used a Real Quantum Computer… and It Broke My Brain

Added: 2026-05-09

[00:00:00]Hello world. I'm an unemployed ex big tech software engineer with over 25 years of experience in the tech industry. These days, many big tech companies are investing massive amounts of money into quantum computing. Some even say that quantum computing is the next trillion dollar industry, that quantum computing will be the next big disruptive thing after the current AI hype bubble eventually dies down. So with that in mind, I'd like to share with you a little misadventure that I had with quantum computers and the learnings that I took away from it. So a couple of years ago, the big tech company that I was working for, they decided to host this internal knowledge sharing conference. This is a conference where representatives from all of the company's business units would converge upon a research facility where we would learn all about the wondrous innovations that our company's R&D department has been cooking up. So they never explicitly mentioned it, but I think the intent for this conference was for people from other business units to come up with ways to make money from all of the innovations that our R&D teams were coming up with. So anyways, I went to that conference and there were a lot of very interesting technologies being presented there. But what really caught my eye was a quantum computer that was hosted in that facility at that time. It must have been one of the most, if not the most powerful quantum computer in the entire world. Now, I'm not a scientist. I really wasn't very good at physics even in school. But even to me, the potential use for quantum computing is huge. So let's take a step back and talk about what a quantum computer is supposed to do for us. Now suppose you're trying to solve a simple math problem. The problem is to find all the sums of two numbers where each number can take the value of zero or one. Now how would a normal classical computer solve this problem? To find all the sums, it would need to take in all of the inputs as bit strings and there would be four such inputs. The computer would perform four computational ad operations and then return four distinct outputs. But a quantum computer works very differently. It would take in a single input bit string. This input bit string would be composed of quantum bits or cubits. And that single input string would represent all four possible permutations of the input. The quantum computer then performs a single computational operation and it returns an output and that output contains all of the outputs all of the sums for the given possible input permutations. So a quantum computer can solve this problem faster than the classical computer. Now, here's the thing, though. Instead of having just four operations, what if you had a problem that has trillions upon trillions of operations to solve? In that case, even the most powerful classical computer, like think a government supercomput out there, would take decades or even centuries to solve this problem, which means it ain't never getting solved. But a quantum computer can at least in theory solve that same problem almost instantly. So think about really hard problems like how could you simulate the spread of cancer through a human body down to the molecular level?

[00:03:59]problems like how to accurately predict the weather of a specific location, say 6 months from now, or how do you decrypt sensitive communications from rival corporations or even nation states in real time? With quantum computers, problems that were literally impossible to solve would become easily solvable.

[00:04:22]So obviously I was super excited with the prospect of this technology and the researcher there he kindly let me know that as an employee I was entitled to a number of free cloud credits where I'm actually able to interact and experiment with this quantum computer using cloud APIs provided by our company. So over the next couple of weeks, I found myself descending into this deep absorbing rabbit hole of quantum computing, exploring, experimenting, and tinkering almost non-stop. By the end of it, if I'm being honest, it was kind of driving me crazy a little bit. In the process, however, I did get several important learnings. The first learning is that while in theory quantum computers are miraculous, in practice they're really not that useful. Why is that? Well, let's take that simple problem that we were looking at earlier. The issue is that while the output provides all of the possible sums and answers that you're looking for, when you actually go and measure that output for the vast majority of computational operations out there, all of those possible answers just disappears into the nether. By measuring the output, you will end up with just one answer randomly chosen from those four possible answers. But for this to actually be useful, we need to get all four answers. Most computations run into this fundamental issue. And after decades of research, scientists and mathematicians, they've only been able to find a small number of algorithms that can extract useful information from the outputs of quantum computers. I think a few of the more famous algorithms include something like Shor's algorithm, which is used to factor huge numbers, and Grover's algorithm, which is used to speed up the searching of databases and such. But by and large for most of the problems that we want to solve with a quantum computer, an algorithm hasn't been discovered yet to actually solve it. So this algorithmic deficit is really what's preventing the quantum computing industry from becoming a trillionoll industry. So financial viability aside, as I started getting deeper and deeper into quantum computers and figuring out how they worked under the hood, things started getting just really weird for me. So at the core of these quantum computers, you have cubits. They're really just electrons, and they're used to store the input and output data.

[00:07:16]Here's the strange part. For a cubit to hold multiple possibilities at once during a computation, the electron doesn't sit in a single definite state.

[00:07:29]Instead, it exists in what's called a super position, a kind of blending of all possible states that the electron could be in. The electron is literally everywhere and nowhere at the same time.

[00:07:45]It's like spinning a coin. While the coin is spinning, it's not head or tails. It's actually both. Only when you stop the coin and look, do you find out definitely whether it's head or tails.

[00:07:58]The craziness of it is that this kind of fuzzy behavior isn't confined to just electrons. From what I understand, all matter, like the stuff that makes up our bodies, the sun, planet Earth, the cosmos, all matter at that sort of particle level works in this weird fuzzy way. So another interesting learning is that physical distance is not what it seems to be. So a quantum computer needs to support basic boolean operations.

[00:08:32]think and and not, right? To do this, they use this technique called entanglement. So, you bring these two electrons super close together. And when you do so, they'll start spinning in opposite directions. One would spin upwards and the other would spin downwards. Now the crazy thing is if you measured one of these electrons and see that hey it's spinning upwards then instantly the other electron would be spinning downwards and the change in the spin of that other electron based on all experiments that people have done over the years that change happens instantly not at the speed of light but instantly.

[00:09:22]So imagine if somehow we took these two electrons and we separated them and we placed them on opposite ends of the known universe. When we measure one electron, the change would happen instantly to the other electron on the other end of the cosmos. Now what the heck does that mean? Does it mean that faster than light communications is actually possible? like something out of Star Trek. Maybe it's instantaneous because there's actually no distance at all. Maybe our entire universe exists inside of a single point in space. Now, one of the crazier things that I learned in this little journey is that there was this research team trying to figure out an algorithm for quantum computers that would actually do some kind of real work, like some sort of a data structure reset. But their experiment accidentally revealed the ability to reach back in time to change the state of a cubit in the past. I know this sounds crazy, but just imagine something has already happened in the past. You do something in the present and that present action changes the past. Weird stuff like this breaks the laws of cause and effect.

[00:10:45]It's like saying if we're visited by someone from the future, doesn't that mean the future has already happened?

[00:10:53]That everything that we're doing right now is already predetermined. This kind of stuff honestly makes me question if we have free will at all. So, at some point in this mad journey, I got a bit too deep into the rabbit hole. I started reading books that explained why this kind of weird stuff was happening and it introduced me to some crazy explanation of this reality. Like there's this theory that our entire universe is actually inside of a black hole. That our universe is stacked one on top of another like a bunch of layers where there is a basement universe. and that our universe is highly unlikely to be this basement universe. There's even this one theory that suggests that our entire universe is actually a simulation and that nothing is actually real. It got to the point where I was reading this physics book one night in bed and I was twisting and turning and muttering to myself and that woke up my wife. She got annoyed and so she yelled at me and she was like, "Stop thinking so much, man. Go to sleep." And soon afterwards, I ran out of my free cloud credits. And that was the end of that little journey.

[00:12:11]So netnet, that's what I learned about quantum computing in this brief feverish adventure. Hope you found it helpful.

[00:12:19]Anyways, if you have a morbid curiosity to join me in this life journey, please feel free to subscribe to my YouTube channel and subscribe to my Substack newsletter. If you want to support me in making these vlogs, please consider becoming a member of this channel or just buying me a coffee. If you like a one-on-one coaching session with me, just schedule it. Anyways, thanks so much for watching. Talk soon. Bye.