(Forbes.com) Author Lance Eliot who specializes in transportation contends that true self-driving cars will be impacted by the advent of quantum computers. To provide context to his readers, Eliot provides in introduction to quantum computing and quantum supremacy.
Quantum computing is one of the hottest trending fields and will continue ahead with great fanfare. Open questions abound such as whether there are classes of problems that can be solved by quantum computers that cannot be solved at all by classical computers, meaning that other than speed alone, perhaps there are types of problems, e.g., driverless cars; we’ve never touched or thought to solve with classical that could be shorn with quantum.
Driverless cars are considered a Level 4 and Level 5, while a car that requires a human driver to co-share the driving effort is usually considered at a Level 2 or Level 3. The cars that co-share the driving task are described as being semi-autonomous, and typically contain a variety of automated add-on’s that are referred to as ADAS (Advanced Driver-Assistance Systems).
For Level 4 and Level 5 true self-driving cars, quantum computers can be a handy aid. Self-driving cars will have OTA (Over-The-Air) electronic communications capabilities, doing so to grab system updates for the on-board AI system from the cloud, and to push data collected by the self-driving car up to the cloud. The computational effort of the Machine Learning/Deep Learning while in the cloud can be huge, consuming tons and tons of classical computing cycles. This means that it can take a while to craft new updates for the on-board AI system, plus it can be quite costly to chew-up all those conventional computer cycles. Into the picture steps quantum computers.
True Self-Driving Cars Will Be Impacted by Quantum Computers
