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Hi everyone, and welcome back to Geek Time. Hi Brad.

Hey Lulu.

So what are we gonna talk about today?

Well, I thought we’ll talk about quantum computing. It seems to be something that a lot of people are talking about these days.

Yeah, I think most people have heard of it, but honestly like if you ask me to translate, I know quantum computing is量子计算。

However, I have no idea what it actually means, so it'd be a very good crash course for me.

All right, so since a lot of people don't really… they might know few basic things about computing and what that is. Before we can talk about quantum computing, we really have to understand what computing is.

And when you think about all the computers we've had for since the birth of computers, there has been really this idea of binary numbers. Two states often on…

二进制就是zero and one.

Exactly.

So that is what we call the basic bit of computing, but most computers run off of not just using a single bit, like you might have like 8 bits which is referred to as a byte. And when you have like two states, you have 2×2×2, but it's two to the 8th power, and that has 256 different states, 000001 like that.

Byte就是字节。 So an eight bit string is a bite and has, like you said, 256 different values.

Yeah, right, and then you go from like bits to bytes and then bytes to kilobytes, which is a kilobyte is 1,024, not exactly 1,000, a lot of people think it's 1,000, but it's really 1,024, because that's 2x2x2x2x2… to the 10th power.

I see.

And so kilobytes to megabytes to gigabytes, and nowadays most people can store a terabyte in their computer, something in the terabytes.

Yeah, 就是我们存储的时候说一个T一个G, so these are terabytes, gigabytes.

Now before we get into like quantum computing, we're just gonna look at an example really quick of 2 bits.

All Right

And if you have 2bits, there's really four possibilities which could be 00, 01,10, and 11. If you like think of them as numbers, they would be like 0, 1, 2, and 3. But when we look at them as a bit format, it would be 00, 01, 10, and 11.

Now when we get into quantum computing, we don't have bits as we do in computing, we have what's called a qubit or a quantum bit, but a quantum bit allows them to have both states at the same time, so rather than having a 0 or a 1, it can be 01, or like somewhere in between that, the 2 bits that we’re looking at could be 00, 01, 10, or 11, so there's four different states if we have 2bits.

Now when we go into quantum computing, we have a qubit and a qubit is similar to a bit. But rather than having two possible states, it can occur with both states at the same time, or like somewhere in between those two states.

And when we get into like two qubits, we have those four that 00, 01, 10, and 11. We can have all four of those states occurring all at once. So it's not just one, it's all of them.

So in my very basic understanding is that quantum computing, this qubit, 量子位it's called, all of these four states to exist at the same time. So it doesn't have to be one or the other.

Right, and so it allows for that and even mixing of states which allows the computers to like quantify things in much faster speeds, much… like much larger degrees, and so basically it allows it to grow exponentially faster. When you have a regular computer, it grows exponentially, but it's 2×2×2, like every bit you add, you have an exponential growth of two, but when you have a quantum computer, it’s like 4x4x4, it can just goes up so much faster.

I see.

You're looking at that or so.

So it's much higher or more effective computing power?

Right, so when you kind of think about this, a lot of computing can be seen as something when we look in cryptography as an example.

Cryptography is about making… this is about encryption and decryption，就是密码和解码。对吧?

Right, and so when you look at current methods like what we use on our current computers, basically their effectiveness would be halved by quantum computing.

And so like, if you have a computer that's using a current method for cryptography, a quantum computer is gonna go through that like a hot knife through butter. It's going to just be able to just decode that or decrypt it so much faster.

OK. Let me make this simpler for audience who are similar to me, don't really have this background, so what you're saying is, in cryptography在密码学里，so you have encryption and decryption, so writing the codes and deciphering the codes.

But now，if you're writing the code use the original computing technology, but then decoding the decryption part, we're using quantum computing, because quantum computing is so much more powerful, it is going to be so easy for quantum computing to decrypt the original codes, ok.

So basically what it's gonna be like is if you have a quantum computer, regular computers probably will be very ineffective when coming to try to decrypt something a quantum computer does, whereas like the opposite like a quantum computer hacker could just easily decrypt anything in regular computers.

I see, whoever can use quantum computers will rule the world.

Essentially yes. But like one of the issues currently with like quantum computers, a lot of it has to with like cost and cooling and things like that.

Cooling?

…building a quantum computer. So if you look at computers nowadays, right, there was this idea that computers, their processing power is going to double every year or so.

But if you look at like the processing speeds of computers, it kind of fizzled out at about like the 4 to 5 gigahertz mark. We're not seeing computers like for people getting higher than that. And that's simply because once you go higher than that, you have to be able to cool it much more effectively, otherwise the CPU will burn up.

So you’re saying the faster the CPU, the more heat it’s gonna give out, I think a lot of people can identify with that. They will be able to understand that. And so you need a cooling system. I use a fan, but I'm sure quantum computer needs more than a fan.

Yeah, like quantum computers need to be kept at like absolute zero like 0 Kelvin or negative like 273 degrees.

绝对零度.

Very cold.

Wow, so it's definitely not a home computer right at a moment.

Definitely not at the moment, but like with a quantum computer, once you start getting anything higher than zero, like if you can't keep it close to zero, then the data integrity goes away, so you can't keep the data safe. You can't really trust the data that you're getting because it can be affected by the heat.

I see. So this is probably one of the major challenges, how to cool it.

Right, so it's not gonna be something you can just put in your freezer at home, because your freezer at home is only like negative twenty, or something like that.

Okay, I think we're gonna wrap up the basic episode about quantum computing, because this is already getting a bit confusing, I think we got the basics covered.

In the advanced episode, I guess we're gonna go to talk about some more facts about quantum computing and also probably some of the problems and utilization of the technology. Okay.

Exactly.

Thank you Brad for sharing this basic Information about quantum computing with us.

We will see you next time.

All right, see you in the next episode.