1.1 Quantum Computing debrief
We are considering a most influential and revolutionary scientific theory combination here, answer to names “information theory” and “Quantum Mechanics”.
Quantum Computing is a new and exciting field at the intersection of mathematics, computer science and physics. It concerns a utilization of quantum mechanics to improve the efficiency of computation.
Quantum computing is not about changing the physical substrate on which computation is done from classical to quantum but about changing the notion of computation itself, at the most basic level. The fundamental unit of computation is no longer the bit but the quantum bit or qubit.
Richard Feynman proposed that, quantum mechanical effects could not be simulated efficiently on a computer led to speculation that computation in general could be done more efficiently if it used quantum effects.
This speculation appeared justified when Peter Shor described a polynomial time quantum algorithm for factoring integers known as Shor’s Algorithm.
In quantum systems, the computational space increases exponentially with the size of the system which enables exponential parallelism. This parallelism could lead to exponentially faster quantum algorithms than possible classically. The catch is that accessing the results, which requires measurement, proves tricky and requires new non-traditional programming techniques.
Start the adventure by looking at this simple game:
- Some are from this reference: http://arxiv.org