Anytime I read about it or when I hear people using it to describe a situation I feel stupid as shit. And how is it can be used to quantumcomputers?
Help a dumbass out. Thanks.
In: 39
Schrödinger’s famous ‘cat’ really has very little, directly, to do with quantum computers: it’s a thought-experiment used to demonstrate the principle of quantum indeterminacy in practical terms. The basic premise is that the cat is in a box, and that box also contains a vial of prussic acid that will break and kill the cat when some arbitrary event occurs.
However, until the box is opened and the contents observed, the cat is in ‘superposition’ — that is, it’s *all possible states simultaneously*. It’s not until the contents are observed that the indeterminate state collapses into a finite one.
Now, how do quantum states help with quantum *computing*….?
Both classical (binary) computers and quantum computers use ‘bits’, that must have two distinct states. Unlike binary bits (which increase a computer’s processing power *linearly*), quantum physics allows a *qubit* to increases processing power *exponentially* by taking advantage of a qubit’s superposition.
To break it down a bit more: for a classical computer, 63 bits is just under 8 bytes — it’s just enough to store 8 characters.
In a quantum computer, 63 qubits can contain an *exabyte* of data (that’s *10**^(18)* bytes).
Thanks to quantum physics, a quantum computer can perform calculations that a classical computer will literally *never* be able to handle.
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