I understand that a computer chip is a bunch of on/off switches. How can you make a switch that is both on and off and how does that help you with calculations?
In: Engineering
Imagine you are trying to solve a giant maze the size of the globe. If you are a conventional computer, you would follow the path to discover the exit in…. a very very long time. If you are a very fast conventional computer with parallel processing, you would multiply yourself say 10, 100, 1000, 10,000, or even 1,000,000 times, but a million of you in the world will still take a long time to solve the maze. There are an estimated 200 Billion computers in the world, even if every computer had 10 parallel processing cores, you would have only 2000 Billion of “you” running around.
In a quantum computer, each additional qubit doubles the number of you running around. So with 500 qubits, there are 327,339,060,789,614,187,001,318,969,682,759,915,221,664,204,604,306,478,948,329,136,809,613,379,640,467,455,488,327,009,232,590,415,715,088,668,412,756,007,100,921,725,654,588,539,305,332,852,758,9376 of you. Meanwhile, there is approximately 7.91×10^17 square inches on the surface of the globe, which is a much smaller number than the previous one. You are essentially everywhere on the globe all at once, including at the exit that solves the maze. So you would instantaneously solve the maze.
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