Quantum Computing: a Very Gentle Glimpse into a Possible Future

This talk will aim to demystify quantum computing and will assume no prior knowledge. The speaker, while having studied Quantum Field Theory many years ago, has only relatively recently started learning properly about Quantum Computing, and is going to try to take advantage of the fact that the ideas are relatively new to him to explain the key concepts simply, to an audience (probably) consisting mostly of non-experts in quantum computing.

Key questions I will try to cover are likely to include * What is quantum mechanics anyway? * What are quantum computers? Are they real? And are they really faster/more powerful than classical computers? * What is a qubit (the quantum computing analogue of a bit) * What problems are likely to be solved well by quantum computers? * How do you program a quantum computer? * How do you get results out of a quantum computer? What kind of results are they anyway? Do you have to visit other universes to get them? * Can you get access to quantum computers online and use Python to program them (kind-of!) * Will quantum computers break all encryption? * What are Shor’s and Grover’s algorithms and (just possibly) how do they work? * What are the challenges with building practical quantum computers? * What is the Python story with Quantum Computing?