Overview Tutorial: Quantum Computers, Q-Bits, Superposition and Advantages

(BloombergNews) “Take-Away” video provides a brief, comprehensible tutorial on supercomputers for the business readership of Bloomberg. The narrator explains that quantum computers will someday make today’s supercomputer look like an abacus.
Graphics illustrate that today’s traditional computers process information in bits that represent one or zero. Quantum processes use q-bits in one or zero–or both at the same time, a phenomenon known as superposition. Q-bits exhibit entanglement, the change in the state of one changes the state in another. This property lets quantum computers consider multiple possibilities at once while a traditional computer plugs away at one possible answer at a time. This means quantum computers could consider multiple possibilities at once and perform unfathomably long calculations that would take thousands of years with traditional computers.
Today there is a lot of hype around quantum computing with incremental advances continuing around the globe. It’s difficult to even make the physical quantum computers which operate at temperatures colder than deep space. Yet most believe it’s worth spending a lot of money to develop quantum computing. Already, IBM and Google have built quantum computers. China is planning in spending hundreds of billions in research in materials on how to make the computers.