Quantum Computing for the Mildly Curious

It’s exciting, but not for the reasons most tech journalists think it is

Maybe, like us, you’ve heard about quantum computing and you think it sounds interesting but you’re still not sure how it works or what it means. Quantum-anything is hard right?

Turns out this isn’t true. We spent the last few weeks digging around in some of the more obscure corners of the internet, and discovered that the problem isn’t conceptual. The problem is that perhaps more any other subject in tech journalism and popular science, most of what’s written about quantum computing turns out to be horribly wrong.

Here’s the standard explanation:

In regular computing, we rely on lots of little switches called bits. A bit has a binary value, either 0 or 1, and when you combine lots of bits together you can store data and execute instructions. This is the stuff that makes your mobile phone go beep. In quantum computing, the switches are different. Instead of representing just a 1 or 0, as conventional processors do; they represent multiple values simultaneously. Here for example, is an explanation from the current Prime Minister of Canada, a schoolteacher (not a physicist)…

Very simply, normal computers work, either there’s power going through a wire or…