[aquila48]

“It is possible to fully encode one bit in one qubit.

However, a qubit can hold even more information, e.g. up to two bits using superdense coding.”

I must be seriously missing something...

So a qubit can hold up to two bits of information, and this is supposed to be exciting or earthshaking??

What am I missing?

[Garth Tater]

"So a qubit can hold up to two bits of information, and this is supposed to be exciting or earthshaking??"

"What am I missing?"

Each qubit can be in multiple states at any instant in time so your code can be following multiple branches at the same time and since the number of branches the code can be on simultaneously is based on an exponential function pretty soon (with enough qubits) the code can doing pretty much EVERYTHING all in one pass.

Or so I've been told. I haven't coded professionally for almost 10 years and even back then people were choosing up camps to be in - it's worthless techno-crap or it's the greatest thing since Cobol and will be able to break any encryption scheme in seconds.

I'm not going to fry my brain worrying about it, I figure by the time they actually get the kinks worked out of it Skynet will be running this place anyway.

[bioqubit]

you are missing nothing. They have it wrong. The reality is that a qubit can exist in an infinite number of possible states at one time. However, we don’t have the technology to handle that. Instead, a vibrating atom/ion has to cooled down so low that the vibrating is reduced so much that we have a shot at generating a “two bit” state. That is all we can handle right now. When we figure out how to handle higher numbers of qubit states, these capabilities are going to be God-like.