Many leading cloud and technology vendors are researching and developing quantum computers that operate by manipulating subatomic particles. These vendors are driven by a vision that quantum computing devices could be millions of times faster than today's computers. Some of the first versions of quantum computers with more limited power were being advertised as this book was published.
Quantum computers are fundamentally different from mainstream binary computers that have existed from the beginning of the electronic computer age. In binary computations, bits can be in one of two states, off or on (represented as 0s or 1s). This basic concept drove the inner workings of the first electronic computers that relied on vacuum tubes, later computers that relied on transistors and, still later, computers relying on integrated circuits.
The quantum computation theory was defined in the 1980s in works published by Richard Feynman, David Albert, and David Deutsch. The additional computational...