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.