Computers have gone through significant progress in the last 20 years. With such technology as android, bluetooth, and smartphones, processing capacity and speed has increased, while the physical hardware has shrunk. But the basic design or architecture is pretty much the same as a classic mainframe IBM. So, how can the computer revolution continue? By shrinking the size down even further to the atomic and subatomic level of quantum mechanics, a generally broad area of research in physics. Tonight, the Perpetual Notion Machine welcomes UW-Madison physicist Mark Saffman as guest. In classic computers, all processing and data storage is in the form of 0’s and 1’s, that is, bits in the binary number system. Computer language and coding instructions, and the data itself are strings and sequences of 0 and 1, but ONLY 0 or 1. Mark talks about quantum bits or qubits, which means that they can be either 0 and/or 1, or BOTH. When qubits can be a combination of 0 and 1 at the same time, this is referred to as superposition. Mark also explains the property of entanglement where particles of two separate qubits exist in a single quantum state. This help stabilize the qubits and makes quantum computing at a larger scale possible.
For a good description of quantum computing, click on this link to the MIT Technology Review Explainer.
Another source from Science Alert is a little more basic.
And finally, for a side-by-side comparison between quantum computing and conventional computing, check out this website Geeks for Geeks.
