Quantum Computing: A Better Tomorrow On The Horizon

Hi everyone! Welcome to my second post. I hope you all are safe, doing well and maintaining social distancing during this difficult time. So, as you have already got the idea about today's topic, lets get into it without any delay.

We all experience the benefits of classical computers or simply computers in our day-to-day activities. But, still there are some challenges that our computers find it difficult to solve. For problems above a certain size and complexity, we don't have that much computational power that can tackle such problems.
Here comes the idea of Quantum Computing. Quantum computing began in the 1980s, when physicist Paul Benioff proposed a quantum mechanical model of the Turning Machine. Despite ongoing experimental progress since the late 1990s, most researchers at that time believed that it was rather a distant dream. But in the recent years, there has been a surge in the Quantum Computing research techniques in both public and private sectors.

What is Quantum Computing?

Quantum Computing is the use of quantum-mechanical properties in order to compute complex computations. Computers that perform quantum computation are known as Quantum Computers. All classical computing systems depend on the fundamental ability to store and manipulate information. Today's computers manipulate data on the basis of individual bits, which store information as binary 0 and 1 states. Whereas, quantum computers works on the basis of quantum bits or qubits. Qubits can be in a 1 or 0 quantum states, or can be a superposition of both 1 and 0 states. However, when qubits are measured the results are either a 0 or a 1, which depends on the present quantum state. Computation is performed by changing the qubits using the quantum logic gates, which have some analogy to the classical logic gates. The study of the computational complexity of problems with respect to quantum computers is known as quantum complexity theory. 

The calculations done on quantum computing depend on a series of complex calculations. A memory consisting of n bits of information have 2^n possible states. A vector representing all memory states thus has 2^n entries. This vector is known as probability vector and represents the fact that the memory can be found in a particular state. The states of the memory are represented using Dirac notation.

What are the application of Quantum Computing?

• Cryptography: Integer factorization, above a pretty large numbers, is believed to be computationally infeasible with an ordinary computers. Quantum cryptography can be able to solve this problem.
• Quantum simulation: Nanotechnology and some chemistry depend on quantum systems, such systems can't be simulated just by normal computational techniques. Quantum simulation is believed to be able to handle such problems.
• Solutions of Linear Equations: The Quantum algorithm of linear equations, or "HHL Algorithm", named after its discoverers Harrow, Hassidim and Lloyd, is expected to provide speedup over classical counterparts.
• Quantum Supremacy: This refers to the hypothetical advantages that a quantum computer will have over a classical computer and this was proposed by John Preskill.

However, it may sound very promising but there are still some technical obstacles that prevent building a large-scale quantum computer. It has been speculated that further advancements in physics can lead to faster computers than today's ordinary ones.

I hope, I'm able to at least explain you what quantum computing means and you have got a general idea about it. Finally, if there's anything that you would like to suggest please feel free to write them in the comment section below. Thank you guys, for reading this brief informational article.
Also, visit "Out of the Box" to read some simple blogs with an 'ambiguous' perspective ;) 

Stay Safe everyone!!