William Hurley

It's Halloween. Either you're getting your kids ready to go trick-or-treating or you're preparing for the onslaught of little candy hounds at your door. Hopefully, you've read the following ten tips beforehand so you'll have a fun, triumphant trick-or-treating night! ©Seanlockephotography / Adobe Stock Stock up: You don't want to be known among the neighborhood kids as the people who ran out of candy early in the evening.

The entire advantage of quantum computing is that it will execute certain specific computer algorithms much, much faster than the classical computers we use today.There's still a long way to go in making these very complex computers work, but even without diving into the details, we can describe the types of things that quantum computing will be very, very good at.

Quantum computing is quite different from classical computing, and there are new fundamentals and terms to learn. Two of these are the concepts of superposition and entanglement — big ideas you need to grapple with as you're learning about this new kind of computing. Superposition The state of possibility that's available to qubits is called superposition, where super means many and position means possibilities.

Imagine flipping a coin in the air. As it’s spinning, is it showing heads or tails? Well, you can't know the answer while the coin is spinning. Only when the coin lands and settles down does it display a definite result.When asking the question "how does quantum computing work?" think of that uncertainty you see while the coin is spinning — it's like the uncertainty we capture and use in quantum computing.