Twenty years after staging its first competition for technological innovations, XPRIZE is offering $5 million to expand one of today’s hottest tech frontiers: quantum computing.
The XPRIZE Quantum Applications competition is aimed at stimulating the development of quantum algorithms that can outdo classical computers when it comes to solving real-world challenges.
It’s a field that’s facing its own set of challenges — for example, the hardware systems that would make use of such algorithms are still under development. And that’s not the only uncertainty factor: Unlike the first XPRIZE, which set up clear guidelines for awarding a $10 million prize for private-sector spaceflight, the goals for the quantum competition have the trademark fuzziness of quantum mechanics.
They’re big goals, “focusing on humanity’s most complex problems,” according to the XPRIZE competition’s backers — which include Google Quantum AI, Google.org and the Geneva Science and Diplomacy Anticipator, or GESDA.
“Quantum computers hold huge potential to help address societal challenges,” Google executives say in a blog posting about XPRIZE Quantum Applications. “For example, in recent research, Google showed how quantum computers could be used for accelerating drug development, designing new battery materials or engineering more efficient fusion reactors.”
In contrast to the classical one-or-zero approach to processing bits of data, quantum computing hardware manipulates “qubits” of data that can represent multiple values until the results are read out. Researchers say such an approach could theoretically be more efficient at handling problems such as network optimization and simulations of molecular interactions — with an emphasis on the word “theoretically.”
“While there are many reasons to be optimistic about the potential of quantum computing, we’re still somewhat in the dark about the full scope of how, when and for which real-world problems this technology will prove most transformative,” the Google executives, Brigitte Hoyer Gosselink and Ryan Babbush, acknowledge in their posting. “We hope launching this prize will help to shed light on these questions — by incentivizing the community to advance and more thoroughly anticipate the positive impact of quantum computing on society.”
The three-year competition timeline requires registered teams to describe their applications and provide an analysis of how long their algorithms would need to run on a quantum computer. Up to 20 teams would share a $1 million progress purse and advance to the next round.
Semifinalist teams would be asked to describe the hardware specifications for running their algorithms, show that their approach could outdo classical computers in speed and/or accuracy, and project the positive impact on broader society if their algorithms could be executed on real quantum hardware.
Judges can pick up to three winners to share the $3 million grand-prize purse. Another $1 million would be split among runners-up. The judges and advisers run the gamut of quantum research, including representatives from Google, Microsoft and Amazon.
Picking the winners may not be easy. In the preliminary competition guidelines, the organizers point to recent research into potential quantum applications — and where that research falls short.
What about improving designs for fusion reactors? “Resources required for advantage are still fairly high,” the organizers say. How about coming up with better ways to simulate nitrogen fixation? “Submission would be stronger if the magnitude of the resource reduction and thought delta were larger.”
Despite all the uncertainties and the feeling of being in the dark, leaders in the field of quantum computing say the competition is worth having, and not just because of the $5 million purse.
“Breakthroughs like these can become companies we fund,” Will Zeng, a partner at the Quantonation venture fund and a member of the prize program’s advisory board, said in a posting to X / Twitter.
University of Washington physicist Kai-Mei Fu, whose research focuses on how crystal defects can be used in quantum computing, told me in an email that the new XPRIZE is “really exciting.”
“Advancing the application space for quantum computing is critical right now, in particular because of the level of investment scalable quantum computing will need,” Fu wrote. “This nicely complements existing, more traditional research support and will hopefully draw more creative thinkers to the field.”
Update for March 7: Two quantum researchers at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory sent along comments about the competition:
- From computer scientist Ang Li: An XPRIZE in developing quantum computing algorithms has the potential to significantly accelerate the practical use of quantum computers to solve some of the most challenging scientific problems in energy and sustainability faster and more accurately. These challenges include high error rate, short coherence time and limited scalability. Currently, algorithms tend to be developed in silos that make them difficult to use across different domains. Transformational approaches are needed to move the quantum computing field forward, and the XPRIZE can provide an injection of attention and visibility to overcome some of the biggest challenges.
- From computational scientist Bo Peng: We recently showed that stable and distributed 20-qubit simulations can be achieved on a Honeywell Quantinuum hardware setup. (See “Modeling Singlet Fission on a Quantum Computer.”) Further, we collaborate across teams to use advanced graph analytics to pre-process quantum data. This optimization eases the deployment of subsequent quantum algorithms and measurements at large scale. (See “Picasso: Memory-Efficient Graph Coloring Using Palettes With Applications in Quantum Computing,” 38th IEEE International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium, 2024.)
For more information, and to register for the competition, check out the XPRIZE Quantum Applications portal page. More than 40 teams have already signed up.
