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by epicwhaleburger 2473 days ago
In no way am I qualified to talk about this with any sort of certainty, but I have been studying EE for the past 2 years and live in a house with a physicist who is probably far more well read in this topic. Classical computers are nice because they are predictable; if you want to order some product online, it would't be very helpful if the bit stream of data coming into your computer was fuzzy and muddled, making it hard to tell a 0 or a 1 apart. Quantum computing takes advantage of quantum properties such as the uncertainty principle and quantum entanglement to store bits in a state of being either a 0 or 1 until we "observe" the bit coming through (quantum bits -> qubit). This allows for algorithms, experiments, and other things quantum to be ran much faster than any classical computer since it can encode more data into a single bit. To minimize the fuzz in a q-computer, they freeze the sh*t out of it to keep the energy at a minimum, along with using conducting materials which excel at conducting heat away (like diamonds). I believe the spin of an electron is what determines the qubit value and when used in conjunction with quantum entanglement will affect other electrons that are already entangled. My little knowledge ends here but with this thought on quantum entanglement, you can see how flipping bits values respectively can allow for more ways to store information with the same amount of "stuff" remaining constant vs. a classical computer.