DevConf.CZ 2025

Mário Fernandes

I am originally a physicist, and specialized in Quantum Computing (both theoretical and experimental), in which I have a PhD.

In 2019 I decided to part from academia and started working as an MLOps Engineer. With time, I was ever more drawn to the programming and DevOps aspects, and now I work as a Software Engineer at Red Hat.


Company or affiliation

Red Hat

Job title

Software Engineer


Session

06-12
16:15
35min
More privacy, better social welfare: advantages of using quantum resources to solve everyday problems
Mário Fernandes

While it is true that quantum computers can provide more computational power than classical computers, they also allow to solve problems in a different manner. And this latter aspect, although interesting by itself, is often overshadowed by the former.

In this talk, I would like to shed some light on it.

Many real-life situations where people might have conflicting interests can be modeled as non-cooperative, multipartite games. Think, for example, of people driving through road-crosses, or competing over resources.

A recent game-theoretic approach [1] has shown that allowing "players" in these games to have access to quantum resources enables
- better coordination in joint decisions
- new Nash equilibria and improved social welfare
- decrease in cheating strategies, by limiting the access to the quantum resources
- enhanced privacy, when compared to classical strategies to attain similar improvements.

This translates solving social problems, where people might have conflicting interests, in a better way.

[1] https://doi.org/10.22331/q-2024-06-17-1376 (paper published in 2024)

Future Tech and Open Research
D0206 (capacity 154)