Why quantum computing?
It would be useful to understand why we should bother about this craziness when we already have ultra fast computers which are doubling in speed every 6 months (Moore’s Law). There are 2 reasons: • We are not sure how long Moore’s Law will hold. As our chips get smaller and smaller we get closer and closer to the subatomic world whose behaviour majorly screws up our current computer architecture. • As mentioned, the possible computational power from quantum computing is tremendous. How does it work? Quantum computing is based on the property of particles to exist in a superposition of different states till they are “observed” by an external observer. This is called the wave-particle duality. This means that in addition to the ‘0’ bit and ‘1’ bits we base our computers on today there can also be various degrees of “0 and 1 at the same time” bits as well. These are called quantum bits or “qubits” for short. Thus, we can have a 3 digit qubit which represents 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7 at t
