Amazon v Google v China: Quantum Computing Will Blow Your Mind.
When Private Companies Take On Nation States
The eggs wouldn’t stay in my mouth. Reading this New Yorker article over breakfast left me gasping so often that whatever I was chewing needed to find another home. So what *is* quantum computing?
Classical computers speak in the language of bits, which take values of zero and one. Quantum computers, like the ones Google is building, use qubits, which can take a value of zero or one, and also a complex combination of zero and one at the same time. Qubits are thus exponentially more powerful than bits, able to perform calculations that normal bits can’t. But, because of this elemental change, everything must be redeveloped: the hardware, the software, the programming languages, and even programmers’ approach to problems.
Now I finally understand the Ant Man movies. But it gets crazier.
At the root of quantum-computing research is a scientific concept known as “quantum entanglement.” Entanglement is to computing what nuclear fission was to explosives: a strange property of the subatomic world that could be harnessed to create technology of unprecedented power. If entanglement could be enacted at the scale of everyday objects, it would seem like a magic trick. Imagine that you and a…
