Andrew Houck

And that's different from not knowing maybe it was alive or maybe it's dead.

It's actually something different, that it has some element of both.

Often when you're using a computer, running an algorithm, one of the things you're trying to do is search for a needle in a haystack to explore some vast possible set of numbers that might be the solution to your problem.

If you have a quantum computer, you can start by putting the computer in the superposition of every possible input you could ever want to put into that algorithm.

And that allows you, in some way, to get

every possible answer in some state.

The problem is as soon as you look at it, you only get one answer and it's randomly picked and that's not very useful.

But this sort of large before you look, the cat is still alive in dead state contains information.

And if you look at it in just the right way and ask just the right question for certain problems, something very interesting can pop out.

Quantum computers are the only different kind of computer that's ever been invented.

For a long time, everybody thought every computer that existed was the equivalent of a Turing machine.

This is the way computer scientists think of computing.

And that means they can all solve some problems and find other problems very hard.

Quantum computers work differently.

They don't just make each step of a problem go faster, a faster processor, more memory.

They can solve problems that we don't know how to solve in any other way because they're fundamentally different.

Sure.

One way that we think about how hard a problem is, is how many steps it takes to solve.

If I have a regular computer that gets better, it still takes the same number of steps to solve, but it can do each step faster.

But if the number of steps to solve is some enormous number, like the number of atoms in the universe, and each step is a little bit faster, it's still not going to be able to be solved.