Quantum Computing Explained! (Well, Sorta)

An anonymous reader writes "Valiant effort to 'explain' quantum computing over on silicon.com — covering the difference between classical computers and quantum machines."

Comments

Highly recommended book

[AdmiralXyz]

Have to agree with the comments above, that article is pretty useless.

Coincidentally, though, at a university book sale a few weeks ago, I picked up a copy of N. David Mermin's Quantum Computer Science: An Introduction, for just $5 (seems to be about $30 on Amazon) and I can't recommend it highly enough. It's an intro to quantum computing textbook, about 200 pages, written specifically for people who have CS or math (as opposed to physics) backgrounds, and while it's almost impossible to get into the nitty-gritty of why quantum computing works without a lot of quantum mechanics esoterica, this book does a great job of explaining how it works (which is plenty complicated on it's own).

It's not a light read (it's a textbook, after all), and contains some serious math, but it's nothing someone with a college education can't handle and it really helped me understand this whole mess better than any popular news article.

Re:Highly recommended book

[blueg3]

Incidentally, from Mermin's website, you can download his lecture notes at no cost. The book is directly based on the lecture notes and, as far as I recall, the notes are pretty good. I took the class while he was working on the book, so all we had to work with was the lecture notes (which have since undergone some revisions), which were essentially a beta version of the book's text.

It should be reasonably understandable to someone with a good CS and mathematical background but limited physics background. (Likewise, it should be reasonably understandable to someone with a good physics background but relatively little CS.) The course was designed to be taken by both CS and physics students. I think it was fairly challenging for the Cornell CS undergrads that were in the course, but your mileage may vary.

Re:Horrible

[noidentity]

Yeah, with a 350-pixel-wide web page (yes, the entire page), and an opening like this, I can't imagine why nobody would read any further:

Time machines - oh, boy!
Steady on Sam, I love science fiction as much as the next geek but I'm not talking about Quantum Leap here. This is even more exciting than time travel. OK, so what is this quantum computing lark then? Quantum computing and quantum information processing are research efforts that seek to exploit quantum mechanical phenomena to perform tasks such as massively parallel computing. The quantum research field also encompasses quantum cryptography, which utilises quantum phenomena to guarantee secure communications.

What are these quantum phenomena you talk of?
Tsk! Clearly weren't paying attention in physics class were you? [...]

Tip to new writers: you aren't witty, you aren't funny, you aren't entertaining. Leave your antics out of the writing and cover the subject matter so well that its inherent nature will be interesting to the reader.

Re:Are quantum computers Turing machines?

[maxwell demon]

The set of problems you can in principle solve with a quantum computer is exactly the same as you can solve with classical computers. The best proof of this is that you can simulate a quantum computer with a classical computer (and vice versa). However, as far as we know you cannot simulate a quantum computer on a classical computer in polynomial time.