WHAT IS QUANTUM COMPUTING?
How the ability to be in two places at once is heralding a new era of ultra-powerful computers
WORDS MARK SMITH
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DID YOU KNOW?
The first dedicated quantum computer for business, 1QBit, was unveiled in 20 12 in Vancouver, British Columbia
Imagine a new type of computer 158 million times faster than the most sophisticated supercomputer we have in the world today. A device so powerful that it could do in four minutes what it would take a traditional supercomputer 10,000 years to accomplish. This is the promise of new technology known as quantum computing.
For decades our computers have all been built loosely around the same design. Whether it’s the huge machines at NASA or your laptop at home, they are all essentially just glorified calculators, and crucially they can only do one thing at a time. The key to the way all computers work is that they process and store information made of binary digits, called bits. These bits only have two possible values: a one or a zero. It’s these numbers that create binary code, which a computer needs to read in order to carry out a specific task. But this is where quantum computing changes things.