Jeff's Blog

In part 1 of this post, I talked about the 80’s television show Quantum Leap, that wasn’t the point of the post. It is fun to imagine traveling around in time; but then again, I digress.   In part one, I introduced the concept of “quantum superposition”; big words, even for an IT strategy consultant.

Have you heard of the particle wave theory? In practical terms, it means that bizarre and counterintuitive effects occur on very small scales, and they can be harnessed.

This “quantum superposition” effect will, for example, will transform how we do “computer math.”  Currently, everything done by computers is in binary. The smallest piece of information a computer handles, the bit, is either a one or zero. A quantum computer, though, would be able to store and work with number systems other than binary.

This means computers would become exponentially more powerful because each “quantum bit” (qubit) could store a much greater range of numbers than the two that binary math restricts us to. Imagine a laptop with the computing power of the world’s 10 most powerful supercomputers. Then you begin to grasp the potential of quantum computing.

Designing chips and IT infrastructure to take advantage of “higher level” math than binary is years away.  The more immediate impact will be in storage.  Most application developers know that 8 bits make up a byte or 1 character.  What if a qubit could hold many bytes or characters?  

Next time, I will share another quantum idea.