The investors behind a who's who of tech giants ranging from @Apple and @Airbnb to @Yahoo and @YouTube are pouring money into a small Australian #quantumcomputing company, cementing Australia's position as a leader in the technology that is expected to revolutionise the 21st century. Sequoia Capital, the Silicon Valley venture capitalists that also backed @Google, Instagram and @PayPal, are now backing @Q-Ctrl, a quantum computing software company based at the @University of Sydney. Q-Ctrl's software, developed by Professor Michael Biercuk at the University of Sydney Quantum Control Laboratory, is designed to help solve what has emerged as one of the biggest problems slowing down the development of a useful quantum computer: how to keep the delicate, atom-scale data bits, known as quantum bits or "qubits", stable long enough for them to be used for computations. To give quantum computers an advantage over classical computers, qubits have to exist in a state known as "superposition", where they represent 0 and 1 at the same time, and where they can be used to quickly make calculations that are either unfeasibly slow, or completely impossible, with the classical data bits now used the world over, which can represent either 1 or 0 but cannot be both at once.
