Introduction to Quantum Physics and Information Processing

Chapter 1

Introduction

Information as accessed by the human mind, and the myriad ways of process-

ing it, is what has set humankind apart in the animal world. The ability to use

the physical systems around us to encode and then to process information has

been evolving in leaps and bounds ever since the dawn of our race! The earliest

form of computation was probably in the form of account-keeping by counting

pebbles or on the fingers. This developed into the abacus, writing symbols,

the computing machine, and now, a laptop or a supercomputer: everywhere

we represent information by means of a physical system, and perform ma-

nipulations on that system