Problems for Quantum Computing
In the previous post, I explained nondeterministic Turing machines and how quantum computers can simulate them for certain problems. It was mentioned that simulation is possible using Quantum Fourier Transform when solutions are periodic. In this post, I will present some examples and other use cases of quantum computing.
Quantum Computing and Nondeterminism
Some time ago, I set out on a journey to understand "What kinds of problems can quantum computation solve efficiently?" I decided to write a series of blog posts to explain this as simply as possible. In previous posts, I discussed the qubit and measurement. In this post, I will finally answer the question. The most common answer is, "It can run computations in parallel." However, as I showed in the previous post about measurement, that is not exactly true. A quantum computer cannot simulate a computer with the enormous number of processors. However, it can simulate a different kind of machine in some special cases: the Nondeterministic Turing machine.
Quantum Computing measurement
This is the second post in my journey to discover "What kinds of problems can quantum computation solve efficiently?" In the first post, I explained what a qubit is and how it can be represented. In this post, I will cover measurement in (not only) quantum mechanics. You have probably heard that when measuring a qubit, it collapses to one of the measured states and loses its actual value. This led me to some natural questions: What is the difference between measurement and any other operation? How does a qubit know it is being measured?
Quantum Computing - qubit
When I asked the question, "What makes quantum computation more powerful?" or "What kinds of problems can quantum computation solve efficiently?", the usual answer was, "It can run computations in parallel." While this is perhaps the most accurate single-sentence answer, I find it both inaccurate and misleading. A few years ago, I began my journey studying quantum computing. My background is in computer science, so my main interest was to understand the problem space that can be solved more efficiently by quantum computation. I did not study physics beyond high school, and my goal was not to delve deeply into quantum physics. In the next few blog posts, I will attempt to provide a better explanation to the question, "What kinds of problems can quantum computation solve efficiently?"