Quantum Computing, explained
As a simple metaphor; let’s start with a human teenage girl. She’s very body conscious, and has an argument with herself over every mouthful.
Her mind works like a qubit. On the subject of whether she wants to eat that cake that sits right in front of her, she has a superposition of multiple thoughts and feelings; yes, no, eeeuw, ooooh!, yuk, etc. All of these coexist simultaneously.
Then comes the input – vibes (waveforms) from friends, parents, & siblings. Their opinions, real or imagined, ripple into her mind and shift her balance. The superposition changes; now it’s whatever, maybe just a bite, everyone’s watching, I deserve it, I’ll regret it & who cares.
But she cannot keep all these impossibilities balanced forever because the noise of the world intrudes; her friends’ voiced opinions, her own hunger, a parent’s glance, all of which blur the delicate state until it decoheres, and at that point the uncertainty collapses to a simple binary outcome; does she eat the cake or not? That’s a zero-one binary outcome – you can’t have your cake and eat it.
Run this scenario a hundred times and statistically you get the true answer. 30 passes versus 70 eats; the right answer is 70% immediate pleasure over a certain long term gain or lack thereof.
And there you have it, the qubit.
Now imagine not just one qubit girl but a whole group of them, all sitting quietly in the zero state. Then someone plonks a cake on the table (the Hadamard gate is applied) pushing each of them into superposition, all leaning to both yes and no but with different proportions.
Entanglement follows as they watch one another’s faces, catch glances, trade whispers, and fold each other’s reactions into their own.
External cues (in this case, thoughts) act as further gates, shifting phases, flipping leanings, amplifying some branches and cancelling others.
The circle settles into a collective superposition, fragile but coherent. An agreed level of disagreement and agreement, so to speak.
Decoherence arrives – a ringing phone, a parent entering – and the state cannot hold. The system collapses together, not just one of them but all of them, and a shared outcome emerges: of course they mostly eat the cake. But every now and again one of them abstains.
Run the experiment a thousand times and there’s your answer (99.9%).
And there you have it, the quantum computer.
When you think about it, we are very used to the concepts of both superposition and entanglement, and also the collapse to the “classical” state, ie most options for actions can be stated as binary options. So I am not sure why quantum computers are such an exotic beast. All they are is the application of human nature to the innards of a computer.
It begs the question though; do we have some quantum bits at the core of our stupidity?
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