What is quantum computing?

Quantum reality is very strange.

Imagine a spinning wheel that’s turning neither clockwise nor counterclockwise. Just by looking at the wheel, you set up a relationship between yourself and the wheel, and this makes the wheel turn in one direction or another.

Imagine two friends who travel to opposite ends of the Milky Way galaxy. Whatever one randomly decides to say upon landing on a distant planet, the other feels compelled to say too.

That’s the world of quantum mechanics. It’s what makes quantum computing so fascinating.

Here’s how we distinguish quantum computing from classical computing:

• Classical computing: A computational model in which the fundamental unit for calculation is a binary bit. Each bit’s value is either 0 or 1.

Every laptop, server, workstation, and smartphone is a kind of classical computer. Even the Frontier supercomputer with 600,000 cores in Oak Ridge, Tennessee is a classical...