Quantum computing is billed as the breakthrough that will change everything by unleashing the kind of big data analysis that will uncover practically every unknown we’ve ever pondered. It’s such a grand concept that it’s hard to get our heads around what that would mean. And it’s not much easier to grasp the details of how the sub-atomic world of quantum physics works.

I’ve written on the topic numerous times and can bang out a surface level explanation of qubits as well as the next non-quantum physicist content writer trying to basically explain the idea to non-quantum physicist reader. Do I really even begin to understand the science of quantum mechanics or quantum computing beyond that? Absolutely not. Haven’t a clue.

But quantum computing is, so goes the word on the street (or in the lab), a thing. John Gribbin’s book Six Impossible Things makes a brave attempt at trying to explain quantum physics to the layman. But it’s still close to impossible for most of us to grasp quantum world concepts like physical reality only existing if we look at it, the future influencing the past and that everything that could possibly happen does, in infinite parallel realities.

I’ve personally reached the conclusion I never will understand quantum mechanics on any meaningful level. Nor quantum computing, which is based on it. I just accept those who describe it, and its possibilities, are not just making it all up. And in the real world, those at the vanguard of trying to develop quantum computing are also more focused on making the science something that is practically useful, rather than getting too caught up in the brain-melting implications of the broader theory.

One such example is Steve Brierley, the 36-year-old founder of quantum computing start-up Riverlane. Riverlane is, more accurately, a quantum software company. A couple of weeks ago the Cambridge University spin-out announced the successful trial of an operating system it hopes could eventually lead to a software market for quantum computers, which already exist at the experimental (usable in a quite limited way) stage.

Quantum computers run on qubits rather than the ‘bits’ that every normal computer relies on. For more details you can check out this explanation but the gist of it is while bits are either a 1 or 0, qubits, by weird quantum magic, are both a 0 and a 1 at the same time. The computing equivalent of Schrödinger’s cat. This, say people who presumably understand these things, increases the theoretical processing power of a quantum computer exponentially in comparison to a standard computer.

While quantum computers are still both hugely expensive to build and maintain in a working condition, plus limited in their practical use cases, progress is being made. Last year Google announced it had achieved ‘quantum supremacy’, meaning they had built a quantum computer able to outperform any existing conventional computer. The achievement was limited to a very specific use case, but still a major development.

Most experts still believe commercially applicable uses of quantum computing is decades away, if it will ever happen at all. In 2015, Mr Brierley, a PhD in quantum information, spoke at a conference. The delegates were polled on when they expected a commercially viable quantum computer to be brought into existence. A third, all top experts in the field, thought creating the hardware such a difficult task that it would probably never happen.

Undeterred, Mr Brierley continued to develop algorithms for a computer many experts believed would probably never exist, despite suffering a mini crisis of confidence. But on further research into the companies and laboratories working on components for quantum computers, he saw that something akin to Moore’s law was taking place.

Moore’s law states that the computing power of microchips doubles roughly ever couple of year because the number of transistors they can hold doubles as the transistors themselves are shrunk. He saw that research labs were getting twice as good at building nano-sized devices roughly every one to two year.

On the presumption that could continue, Mr Brierley decided the thirty percent of experts who had expressed the opinion commercial quantum computers would never exist, were wrong. And indeed, he claims that the progress over the past five years has come as a surprise to many of the experts who would have doubted the practicality of quantum computers as recently as 2015. Mr Brierley admits “I don’t think anyone really felt that the progress would be so rapid”.

Despite the progress, genuine commercial applications for quantum computing are still almost non-existent. One of the major hurdles is that each quantum computer developed, IBM is also working on the technology, has its own unique operating system. What Riverlane is attempting to do is develop a universal operating system for quantum computers. There product is called Deltaflow.OS.

A unified operating system would mean quantum computing software application that could run on multiple machines could be developed. That opens the door for a commercial market for quantum computing applications. Deltaflow.OS was itself a response to Riverlane’s own challenges attempting to run software on a quantum computer.

“It took six months to get a programme working. So we started building Deltaflow for ourselves because we needed a way to provide software for quantum computers.”

Mr Brierley compares the current state of quantum computing to that of PC technology in the 1970s and digital cameras in the early to mid-1990s.

“You’ve got people wanting to understand the technology and try it out, but it being really quite hard to do so at the moment. When the first digital cameras were produced, they were rubbish compared to film cameras, but it’s a technology that completely changed how we take pictures and led to a whole new industry. Currently, quantum computers are not as good as a laptop. But new industries will be born out of this technology.”

Riverlane’s focus is on areas where quantum computers have the most significant natural advantage over traditional machines. An example would be how quantum mechanics can predict the behaviour of molecules approaching a protein. This has obvious application in materials design, industrial process and pharmaceuticals.

Mr Brierley explains:

“You can think of quantum computers as chemistry on steroids. Drugs bind to a protein, that is some molecule binding to some other molecule. That is a fundamentally quantum system. Quantum computers are essentially controllable quantum systems, which are very good at modelling other quantum systems.”

The implication is that thousands of different drugs could be tested in the same time it currently takes to work on one.

But how long before we might see a genuine practical, commercial outcome from quantum computing? Mr Brierley now thinks that moment could come within half a decade:

“It will solve problems that would otherwise never get solved. There are some computations that a conventional computer would never solve that a quantum computer can.”

The UK may have performed disappointingly compared to the USA when it comes to developing big technology companies but we are currently leading the field when it comes to quantum computing. Around 20% of all of the quantum hardware companies in the world today are British. Many, like Riverlane, are spin-outs from university research labs and is one of the reasons why Mr Brierley thinks his company has developed Deltaflow.OS to the point it has. They, as a quantum software company, can speak to hardware labs and collaborate and share insights.

Scottish laser developer and manufacturer M Squared Lasers, produces the lasers and control systems being used to build quantum hardware. The company’s co-founder Graeme Malcolm is convinced Riverlane’s operating system is a critical step towards quantum computing evolving from a limited and controlled lab environment into a commercially applicable science because it will give other researchers the opportunity to test problems out on different versions of quantum hardware and systems.

He says “first came analogue, then came digital, quantum is what’s next. It will revolutionise the economy and society alike”.

The UK government is also invested in the country’s quantum computing sector and has invested hundreds of millions of pounds in supporting its development. Mr Brierley believes that government support could, and should, go even further. He thinks it should be an early customer of commercial applications. But he is convinced those commercial applications will exist within 5 to 10 years. Watch this space.