Quantum Computing - What is it?

[shawnofdenver]

From what I know, it involves qubits (called such because they are at the quantum level) and it's called Quantum computing because it uses Quantum Mechanics to solve problems, and can solve them faster than traditional binary computers.

One of the fundamental uses I've read is when it comes to the cloud, is securiing the servers in the cloud with encryption algorithms calculated by Quantum Computing.

Quantum Computing isn't like a traditional computer because it uses said qubits and not transisters, nor operate on binary.

Am I missing something important, or is that the jist of it?

 

[Chipz]

I'm not an expert on the subject and I don't understand a lot of the underlying mechanics. In general a qubit does not translate to a transistor, rather a qubit translates to a bit. A bit is a boolean switch whereas a qubit is a vector, which means it can have more than 2 states. How they intend to influence those states with their modern parallel of logic gates and how they intend to measure the outcomes is a mystery to me, and I think to some degree it's a mystery to them (at least from a practical engineering standpoint).

What I think makes quantum computing so hard to understand, even for computer scientists, is the complete lack of a logical paradigm which could really take advantage of new information, at least in the majority of programming fields. It's very obvious how qubits could explode data efficiency in a way which would improve many algorithm's immediately.