Book Reviews: Quantum Computing (Natural Computing Series), 2nd ed.
Queue · 2004
A handful of good introductions to ideas in quantum computing—a new, multidisciplinary research area crossing quantum mechanics, theoretical computer science, and mathematics—have appeared in the past few years. This introduction stands out, in being friendly and brief. It provides one of the first overviews of, and introductions to, this nonstandard form of computation from the mathematical and computer science viewpoint. The field of quantum computing promises to solve some complex problems through a massive use of parallelism’s power, achieved via the properties of quantum physics—in particular, the superposition of bits, known as quantum bits, or qubits. This kind of quantum computing model could give scientists enough power to make longer-range predictions about the weather, for example, or could enable them to decode and break any traditional code.