Google has put more than $7.5 million ($US 5 million) on offer for the development of quantum computing algorithms to solve real-world problems.

In partnership with the Geneva Science and Diplomacy Anticipator (GESDA) and the X Prize Foundation, Google is offering the prize pool for the quantum applications competition.

The competition will run for three years and is designed to generate quantum computing algorithms that can be implemented to solve real-world problems.

In a blog post, Google.org director Brigitte Hoyer Gasselink and Google Quantum AI head of quantum algorithms Ryan Babbush said most studying of quantum algorithms has been in the context of “abstract mathematical problems”.

“Less work has gone into assessing those algorithms for specific, real-world use cases,” they said.

“Likewise, much less effort has gone into quantifying how large a quantum computer is needed for a decisive quantum advantage over classical computing in such problems.

“While there are many reasons to be optimistic about the potential of quantum computing, we’re still somewhere in the dark about the full scope of how, when and for which real-world problems this technology will prove most transformative.

“We hope launching this prize will help to shed light on these questions by incentivising the community to advance and more thoroughly anticipate the positive impact of quantum computing on society.”

The quantum algorithms will be able to be put into practice today or in the future to solve societally beneficial goals, including those described by the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.

It will be open to near-term applications using today’s Noisy Intermediate Scale Quantum (NISQ) Processors and applications for large-scale, fault-tolerant quantum computers to be developed in the future.

“While we believe there are useful applications to be discovered in the NISQ era, most of quantum computing’s impact will come once we’ve built large-scale quantum computers - and we can identify those applications now, so we have them ready to deploy as we build more capable hardware,” Gasselink and Babbush said in the blog post.

Google pointed to recent research showing that quantum can assist in accelerating drug development, designing new battery materials and engineering more efficient fusion reactors as examples of how the technology can have real-world applications.

The prize money will be dished out across three stages.

Using quantum to help society

To qualify, a team must describe a socially beneficial application that they are aiming to solve and then provide an analysis of how long their algorithm would need to run on a quantum computer before reaching a solution.

Up to 20 teams will be selected from the applications to share in $US1 million of the prize money and advance to the finals.

These finalists will then need to outline the hardware specifications needed to run their quantum algorithm and provide evidence that it is faster or more accurate than a classical computer solution.

They will also need to project the positive impact it would have on society if implemented effectively.

Up to three winners will eventually be selected to share in $US3 million in funding, while the runners up will share $US1 million.

The competition will be judged by a group of cross-sectoral experts who will serve as advisers and judges, and will be assembled by X Prize.

Google in 2019 claimed that it had built a working, fault-tolerant quantum computer with its 53 qubit Sycamore processor, and midway through last year claimed another major breakthrough by conducting an experiment on its new 70 qubit system that would’ve taken a supercomputer 47 years to complete.