I recently received the results of my thesis and am glad to say that I passed with flying colours, which is extremely satisfying considering the amount of work and effort that I put into it. Countless days and hours were spent in front of both the laptop and a number of large books on the subject.
As you've probably guessed from the title of this post, my thesis was a research paper on Quantum Computing. Now, since I don't want to bore you all with the Physics behind this particular subject, i'll just keep it brief and give you the basic concepts.
In conventional computing, a number of transistors on a circuit board are turned off and on in a controlled sequence according to what task the computer is required to carry out. These transistors can either be on or off, or in a state of 1 or 0. That is, each transistor can either be on (1) or off (0), but not in both states at the same time. The switching on and off of these transistors creates binary strings. These strings are made up of 1s and 0s and look something like this: 10111100010010. These 1s and 0s are the base components of a computer and are known as Binary Bits.
In quantum computing, on the other hand, the base components are known as Quantum Bits or Qubits. These qubits are essentially atoms or sub-atomic particles. The beauty of quantum computing, and the true source of their potential power, is the fact that qubits can be in a number of states simultaneously. That is, where a binary bit can only be in a state of 1 or 0, qubits can be in both a state of 1 and of 0 at the same time. This phenomenon is due to Physical principles such as wave-particle duality, superposition of matter and decoherence, and is the reason why quantum computing has the potential for creating extremely powerful machines that can perform an extremely large number of calculation in a very short amount of time.
More on this subject coming soon....
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