What is quantum computing? It's something that could have been thought up a long time ago - an idea whose time has come. For any physical theory one can ask: what sort of machines will do useful computation? or, what sort of processes will count as useful computational acts? Alan Turing thought about this in 1936 with regard (implicitly) to classical mechanics, and gave the world the paradigm classical computer: the Turing machine.?
But even in 1936 classical mechanics was known to be false. Work is now under way - mostly theoretical, but tentatively, hesitantly groping towards the practical - in seeing what quantum mechanics means for computers and computing.?
In a trivial sense, everything is a quantum computer. (A pebble is a quantum computer for calculating the constant-position function - you get the idea.) And of course, today's computers exploit quantum effects (like electrons tunneling through barriers) to help do the right thing and do it fast. For that matter, both the computer and the pebble exploit a quantum effect - the "Pauli exclusion principle", which holds up ordinary matter against collapse by bringing about the kind of degeneracy we call chemistry - just to remain stable solid objects. But quantum computing is much more than that.?
The most exciting really new feature of quantum computing is quantum parallelism. A quantum system is in general not in one "classical state", but in a "quantum state" consisting (crudely speaking) of a superposition of many classical or classical-like states. This superposition is not just a figure of speech, covering up our ignorance of which classical-like state it's "really" in. If that was all the superposition meant, you could drop all but one of the classical-like states (maybe only later, after you deduced retrospectively which one was "the right one") and still get the time evolution right. But actually you need the whole superposition to get the time evolution right. The system really is in some sense in all the classical-like states at once! If the superposition can be protected from unwanted entanglement with its environment (known as decoherence), a quantum computer can output results dependent on details of all its classical-like states. This is quantum parallelism - parallelism on a serial machine. And if that wasn't enough, machines that would already, in architectural terms, qualify as parallel can benefit from quantum parallelism too - at which point the mind begins to seriously boggle!
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