One of the two big news items these days from the realm of computing is quantum computers (the other is artificial intelligence). Recently, IBM published a paper in which it claimed to have demonstrated that a quantum computer could solve a useful problem that today’s conventional computers can’t, a result merited by concerns that their computations might become too unreliable when they also become complicated.
What are qubits?
Quantum computers use qubits as their basic units of information. A qubit can be a particle – like an electron; a collection of particles; or a quantum system engineered to behave like a particle. Particles can do funky things that large objects – like the semiconductors of classical computers – can’t because they are guided by the rules of quantum physics. These rules allow each qubit to have the values ‘on’ and ‘off’ at the same time, for example.
