Globally-renowned Cambridge Quantum Computing has wowed the technology world with an astonishing breakthrough in the field.

The UK company reveals that it has used the ‘natively quantum’ structure of natural language to open up an entirely new realm of possible applications by translating grammatical sentences into quantum circuits, and then implementing the resulting programs on a quantum computer and actually performing question-answering. 

This is the first time that natural language processing has been executed on a quantum computer, the Bridge Street business discloses. And there is a bonus in the innovation.

By achieving the results without relying on quantum RAM, CQC scientists have created a path to truly applicable quantum advantage within the Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) era.

By using CQC’s class-leading and platform-agnostic retargetable compiler, tiket, these programs were successfully executed on an IBM quantum computer, achieving ‘meaning-aware’ and ‘grammatically informed’ natural language processing – a dream of computer scientists since the earliest days of the computer age. 

CQC says it looks forward to providing further details in the near future –including ways to scale the programs so that meaningfully large numbers of sentences can be used on NISQ machines as they themselves scale in quantum volume and using other types of quantum computers.

Cambridge Quantum Computing is a world-leading quantum computing software company with 62 scientists across offices in Cambridge, London, San Francisco, Washington DC and Tokyo. 

It builds tools for the commercialisation of quantum technologies that will have a profound global impact.

The company combines expertise in quantum software, specifically the tiket quantum development platform, enterprise applications in the area of quantum chemistry, quantum machine learning, quantum natural language processing and quantum augmented cybersecurity (IronBridge).

Business Weekly reported on Valentine’s Day that global giant IBM, headquartered in New York and with an $80 billion turnover, had fallen in love with the company which is headed up by CEO Ilyas Khan.

IBM made an unspecified strategic investment in the business, following years of collaboration between CQC and IBM’s quantum computing team.