How to get started in quantum computing
To the untrained eye, a circuit built with IBM’s online Quantum Experience tool looks like something out of an introductory computer-science course. Logic gates, the building blocks of computation, are arrayed on a digital canvas, transforming inputs into outputs.But this is a quantum circuit, and the gates modify not the usual binary 1 or 0 bits, but qubits, the fundamental unit of quantum computing. Unlike binary bits, qubits can exist as a ‘superposition’ of both 1 and 0, resolving one way or the other only when measured. Quantum computing also exploits properties such as entanglement, in which changing the state of one qubit also changes the state of another, even at a distance.Those properties empower quantum computers to solve certain classes of problem more quickly than classical computers. Chemists could, for instance, use quantum...
