D-Wave Stock Finally Goes Public: What a Letdown

Imagine a cake that you were instructed to cut by an individual who would then choose which piece to take. Cutting the cake squarely down the middle would be the only way to ensure you received your fair share. Now, imagine you were cutting the cake for multiple individuals with different preferences – size of piece, amount of icing, etc. Figuring out a way to cut the cake while satisfying everyone’s desires is a problem so complex that computer scientists have been working on it for years.

“Envy-free cake-cutting” is just one of many computer science problems that have yet to be completely solved. It may sound trivial, but such a problem has many pragmatic use cases such as allocating ocean resources among countries. Finding a computer that can solve extremely difficult problems is one appeal of quantum computing.

Hardware vs. Software

Famed venture capitalist Marc Andreessen wrote in 2011 that software would eat the world. His prediction that software companies would be the next big opportunity came true with the emergence of firms like Amazon, Google, and Airbnb. Software-as-a–service (SaaS) is an entire b