• Barbarian
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    2 months ago

    I’m also not an expert on this, but from my limited knowledge, the problem with measurements collapsing a qubit into either 1 or 0 is because they’re so small and so finicky that any measurement is by nature destructive. They’re small enough that throwing a photon at it causes them to lose information, and you can’t measure them without throwing a photon at it.

    • Alphane Moon@lemmy.worldOPM
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      2 months ago

      This is the part I don’t understand, if we are not defining (measuring) 1s and 0s, then what is going on?

      How do you represent data, execute commands on data if there are no 1s and 0s.

      • Barbarian
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        2 months ago

        Again, not an expert, but as far as I know the data exists as some value between 0 and 1 (a float, basically). You just can’t tell what it is precisely.

        You can control them by blasting them with radio waves. Then, when you’re done giving them operations in this manner, you shine light on them and if they fluoresce, it’s a 1, if not, it’s a 0.

        The probability of it being a 1 is dependent on how big the float between 0 and 1 was (so, 0.8 has an 80% chance of being a 1 and a 20% chance of being a 0).

        I could be horribly wrong, this is just what I picked up from some baby’s first quantum computer explanations I stumbled across.