Last week Microsoft revealed the astonishing progress they’ve made in the development of quantum computing through the announcement of Majorana 1.

It’s one of the most ridiculous mic-drop moments in the history of technological competition. Where Google and IBM are toiling in the thousands of qubits, slowly announcing doubling, Microsoft popped up and announced a million. Even accepting some hyperbole, it’s quite stunning.

Ever since I learned about computation while studying the philosophy of mathematics, it was evident to me that classical computation had easily-reachable limits.

I had a stunning moment of realisation at university. We designed turing machines on paper to calculate a seemingly simple problem. We were looking to calculate the combinations of people in a small town of twenty or thirty thousand inhabitants.

Once we had the machine sketched out, we were brought to realise that while this calculation is perfectly decidable, it could never be run to completion. The actual number of results would be greater than the number of available particles in the universe.

For a quantum computer with sufficient qubits, conducting calculations over these vast ranges is relatively trivial. And so we have always needed quantum computers to resolve certain classes of problems relating to the real world, to atoms, amino acids, and small-town politics.

Unlocking a million qubits would unlock more real-world progress than many people realise. In conjunction with classic computation with machine learning, we’re truly entering a new age and a step change in human capability.

For anyone looking for an understand of the underlying technology, here’s a great video that summarises the development and requires no mathematical knowledge of quantum mechanics.

At Owl + Lark we’re swooning over the discovery a bit. And I thought it worth listing out just a few of the ways that we’d be able to use quantum computation for the betterment of mankind, sleep and mattress design:

• Computational chemistry: The direct (and personalisable) creation of hormones to modulate sleep onset, insomnia, and other aspects of the sleep cycle.
• Optimisation algorithms for understanding sleep staging in classic EEG polysomnography.
• Quantum Biology. A deeper understanding and simulation of the effect of light at different spectral powers on the myriad structures of the skin. We already know that light affects us all the way down to mitochondria. This would allow us to develop targeted products that use light to modulate and influence biological process in the human body.
• Mattress design. The range of possible materials for optimum mattress construction is dizzying. Simulations could help decide optimum structures that optimise for the human body, lifecycle waste, construction, cost etc.
• Materials research. Computational chemistry and materials design will allow the development of far better adapted materials than petrochemical foams and natural animal/plant fibres.
• End-of-life. Imagine every product we make having an associated enzyme that can turn it into a carbon sink at the end of its life (or even construction aggregate, or fertilizer). This is what we’ll ask of quantum computers.
• Supplement interactions. The elixir of life (and all of its co-morbidities) lies behind the enormous calculating power of a quantum computer.

And there is so much more. Let me know what you’re excited about in quantum computation!