Let me tell you about something really cool
and by cool I mean about -273 degree Celsius cool
Quantum computers
where they place nuclei, electrons or even light in a computer
in classical computers, information is stored in the form of bits, zero or one
in quantum computers, it can be in any combination or "superposition" of both
A quantum bit or "qubit", can be an electron's spin in a magnetic field
if spin up is one and spin down is zero,
then spin sideways is in a superposition of both spin up and down
and so of both zero and one
so compared to classical computers where the amount of information is limited to only the number of bits
with superposition, it is two times the number of qubits
Now if we entangle those qubits, the power becomes overwhelming
Quantum entanglement is simply a very weird relationship between quantum objects in superposition
where, for example, the measurement of an electron at earth
simultanously influences the other entangled electron at zorg
regardless of the distance
An everyday object such as a three headed dragon
can be compared to three entangled qubits
They are strongly corelated that they become inseperable
therefore you must think three heads at a time
since separating them kills the dragon
consider wearing a mask to be one and not wearing it to be zero
All or none of the heads may be wearing masks or any possible arrangement in between
so, we have a superposition of eight different states
find a four headed dragon and you'll have sixteen and so on
to get a sense of how powerful that is,
imagine that your coach forced you to do two pushups in the first day of quarantine
and the next day double the number of pushups you did the day before
after a month, you will have to do about 1 billion pushups
compared to thirty when you increase it only by one
Ahaaaa
so compared to the linear increase in classical computers,
the computational space in quantum computers increases exponentially as we increase the number of qubits
So it is when we entangle the qubits that the true power appears
there's a problem though
when we try to see or measure the superposition,
it gives us one random answer
so in order to make sure we got the right answer instead of just a random one,
quantum algorithms plan the problem in such a way
creating superpositions along different paths
where paths to the wrong answers cancel out
and paths to the correct answer add up
this leads to exponential speedups!
since we can now make use of the superpositions created in our computation
and then extract the correct answers upon measurement
giving us the ability to solve certain types of problems
that take thousands of years on the most powerful classical computers
in a day or much less!
seems perfect..
no
these qubits are extremely fragile
and any external noise interacting with them will lead to high error rates
that's why most quantum processors must be isolated and stored near absolute zero
because of this problem,
we are still trying to reach a perfect 100 qubit system
but if we can make a large enough system,
we might be able to advance in areas like machine learning and artificial intelligence
introduce a safer quantum encryption
or even develop better drugs
by simulating the quantum interactions at the molecular level more accurately
but getting to see how well quantum mechanics work is certainly the biggest win
