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QUANTUM COMPUTING: THE ARTICLE I HAVE BEEN AVOIDING
Description
In this episode of The Agile Software Engineering Deep Dive, Alessandro Guida takes a software engineer’s first serious look at quantum computing.
The episode starts with the basic questions: where did the idea of quantum computing come from, what is a qubit, and why does a quantum computer behave so differently from the machines we use today?
From there, the discussion explores superposition, measurement, entanglement, interference, quantum gates, and quantum circuits, with a strong focus on understanding what actually happens during a quantum computation.
The episode also looks at Grover’s search algorithm and Shor’s factoring algorithm, including why Shor’s work has already influenced the move toward post-quantum cryptography.
There is also a look at the competing hardware technologies, the software ecosystems being built by Microsoft, Google, and IBM, and the increasingly important relationship between quantum computing and classical software systems.
The broader question is whether software engineers should care about quantum computing before it becomes commercially widespread.
The answer may have less to do with predicting the future and more to do with what quantum computing teaches us about computation itself.
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