A little bit of normality

For a long time, things didn’t look good for the final “Schüler-Hochschule” event on Saturday of this school year. After all, the university’s COVID-19 crisis management team had—understandably—decided to impose a general ban on events for the 2020 summer semester. Professor Jörg Lässig and student advisor Daniel Müssig from the Department of Computer Science weren’t deterred by this and found a way to make the event possible online.

With the topic “Quantum Computing,” they hit the nail on the head regarding current questions and problems—for example, the “traveling salesman problem,” which companies such as package delivery services have to solve every day: In what order should package recipients be delivered to so that the route for a delivery person is as short as possible, no address is visited twice, and the person returns to the starting point at the end?

If such so-called combinatorial optimization problems are to be solved quickly and in a resource-efficient manner, special computers are needed whose operation, unlike that of classical computers, is based on the laws of quantum mechanics. Quantum computers also deliver significantly faster and more accurate results for the development of new drugs or encryption algorithms to protect against cyberattacks. Even in the financial sector—for example, when calculating entry and exit signals for stock investments—the speed advantages of a quantum computer can make a decisive difference in financial outcomes.

For the participants in the Student University, the online event was an introduction to a still very new field of computer science with enormous future potential. We would like to extend our sincere thanks to Professor Lässig and Daniel Müssig for organizing the Student University as an interactive online lecture!