QUANTUM COMPUTING MADE EASY

The dictionary describes a computer as "a programmable electronic device designed to accept data, perform prescribed mathematical and logical operations at high speed, and display the results of these operations". Within the computer is a microchip, which can be found in virtually every electronic device worldwide. The number of transistors on these chips has, astonishingly, increased from a few thousand in 1971 to over five billion today. In all this time, the same mathematical model for the computer has been present. But, as the size of transistors continues to get smaller and smaller, the physics that describe them will eventually enter the strange realm of quantum mechanics. This means that the previous rules, and the mathematics that go with them, may soon be overturned... In everyday computing, a unit of data is known as a bit (shorthand for binary digit); each bit has one of two values, either 0 or 1. For a large part of the 20th century, the bit was characterised by the..