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Computer technology has improved exponentially over the last 50 years. But the headroom for bigger and better electronic solutions is running out. Our best hope is to engage the power of quantum physics. “Quantum algorithms” had already been written long before hardware was built. These would enable, for example, a quantum computer to exponentially speed up an information search or crack the mathematical trick behind internet security.

This book describes quantum computing, gives some mathematical background with a sample of coding, shares the problems to get it into large-scale use, and describes the ethical problems, humanitarian problems, military ramifications, and the likely developments of its marriage with AI. There are a few equations in the book but the book is not complicated on the whole to read and understand.

What can a quantum computer do? If we have a sequence of 30 zeroes and ones, it has about one billion of possible values. However, a classical computer can only be in one of these one billion states at the same time. A quantum computer can be in a quantum combination of all of those states, called superposition.