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Table Of Contents
A Practical Guide to Quantum Computing
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In this chapter, we have taken our first steps in the theoretical formalism behind quantum computing. We have explored what a qubit is and what its similarities and differences are with respect to (classical) bits.
We first focused on how the state of a qubit can be represented as a normalized linear combination of the two computational basis states
and
, and we took that opportunity to discuss how, in fact, qubit states are vectors of complex numbers.
Building on this foundation, we gave some physical meaning to the states of qubits by introducing quantum measurements and discussing some of their odd properties. We saw how, unlike measurements in the classical world, quantum measurements are probabilistic, may lead to a loss of information, and cannot allow us—at least when measuring in the computational basis—to fully determine the state of a system.
Finally, we explored how quantum circuits can be constructed using quantum gates in combination with measurement...