Interested in Quantum Computing? Bookmark this!
It's not too often I add a new bookmark and I almost never tell people to bookmark things.
But Zack at smbc-comics.com did an awesome job (as always) creating a comic strip that explains correctly and concisely the way quantum computing actually works. He did this without any quantum woo or quantum bullshit.
I'm going to let it speak for itself.
http://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/the-talk-4
Hope you enjoy it!
I'm still lost lol
Me too but lots of effort have been put into this. :-)
Don't stress it too much. Just book mark it and anytime you read something magical about quantum computing, just link back to it.
There's a lot of woo and a lot of bullshit circulating. This cuts through it pretty clearly, but you have to have been listening to popsci views on quantum computing in order to understand what he's really saying.
I'm not the brightest spark, I find things like this really hard to get a hold of, maybe it's my age, I'm sure I used to be brighter :)
Summary..
We describe probability as a real number between 0 and 1 or if you prefer, a percentage between 0 and 100%.
Quantum mechanics describes probability using a series of numbers that can be negative or positive. This is best described as a wave because it is a complex number that has amplitude components which evolve over time.
When something strongly negative interacts with something strongly positive, they cancel each other out. Whatever "event" they would have represented then, simply does not occur.
Contrast this with the popsci view that a quantum bit is both 0 and 1 and there are infinite parallel universes all working to solve your problem.
The truth is that a regular bit is like a light switch, it is either on or off. A quantum bit is like a dimmer switch, it can be any value between all the way on and all the way off. But it's a bit more complex than that because if this dimmer were arranged in a series with a bunch of others it could extract light by preventing the others from coming full on OR full off, leaving the others somewhat dim even if cranked to full power, or still lit even if shut completely off.
This is because if you have 2 qubits wherein a single state is highly probable on one qubit and highly improbable on the other, those two waves will cancel eachother out and produce an interference pattern.
It is controlling these interference patterns that is the "magic" behind quantum computing.
Thank you for that, the more times I read it the clearer it becomes
Also there's this :D
Yeah you were. Admit it lol
Hubby has tools that do that I'm not trusted with them but I think I get it
I've never lied about it :)
Oh I'm not talking about you. :D
The lightswitch dimmer is a bad example because it's hard to think of negative light. But if you've ever had a drill or a saw with variable forward and reverse speeds that would be a good analogy.
Brilliant style! Kids these days...
I understood maybe half of it. But it's reassuring in a way. I guess quantum computers aren't going to take over the world anytime soon.
Excellent
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