Business Applications for Quantum Computing

While few people think about it, underlying every application of computers in organizations today is math, calculated using binary digits or 'bits.' The original computers of the 1950s could perform about 465 multiplications per second, and today's computers are billions of times faster. However, there is an important class of arithmetic problems that remain out of reach for classical computers: Large-scale 'combinatorics' calculations. Combinatorics problems ask the question, 'How many ways can this set of objects be combined?' Such problems can also ask whether a certain combination is possible, or what combinations of objects are 'best' by some defined metric. The authors argue that a surprising number of practical organizational problems can be viewed as combinatorics problems and describe how fields from finance to chemical engineering and cybersecurity will be impacted by the emergence of quantum computers.