Comparing Quantum Encoding Techniques

The concepts behind quantum computing have existed since the 1980's, but in the past few years, the field has experienced significant, rapid progress. In October 2019, Google demonstrated quantum supremacy for the first time, showing that a quantum computer took less time to complete a calculation than a classical computer would. In classical computers, information is stored as zeroes and ones in bits. In quantum computers, information is stored as a superposition (a digital mix) of zeroes and ones in qubits. A quantum computer manipulates the probabilities associated with superpositions to perform operations and maximize the probability of the correct answer being measured at the end. A sufficiently developed quantum computer would be capable of performing computations that classical computers cannot do by leveraging quantum principles. However, quantum computing is currently in the NISQ (Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum) era, meaning that quantum computers contain too much noise and not enough qubits. Noise, such as decoherence, introduces error to computations performed.