Nature. In a experiment, I don't know yet. Why is Blight so far? Like, it sounds so simple.

They had no idea. But now the data's, I find this not only refreshing, but at some level

astounding. Nature.

Welcome to this week's nature podcast. In the show, we're taking a look at how to write software for quantum computers. Plus the uncertain future of Asia's mountain glaciers.

This is the nature podcast for September the 14th, 2017. I'm Adam Levy.

And I'm Charmany Bundell.

A computer is a pretty handy device, but the processor itself would be useless without software,

sets of instructions and information that tell a computer how to operate.

For the first computers, that meant physically moving dials and cables,

but now software consists of computer programs, written in code,

that allow us to do everything, from

analyzing black hole data to posting on Facebook. But computer hardware is developing too.

Physicists are starting to build working versions of a completely new kind of processor

that's based on quantum physics. And this means we'll need a completely new kind of software.

Reporter Lizzie Gibney spoke to William Zeng from quantum computing firm

Raghetti Computing about how to make useful software for the first quantum machines.

He started by explaining what quantum computers are and why researchers are so keen to build them.

Yeah, so the basic idea is that all the computers that we've been working with for the last

80 years or so are all based on electronics. And actually the world is more complicated than that.

There's physics underneath it that we've known about for 100 years called quantum mechanics.

And so the idea is we're going to try and build technology,

we're going to try and build computers that use this new kind of physics. And what kind of

...