This document discusses the history and concepts of quantum computation. It begins with early classical computer science developments like Boolean algebra and the first general purpose computers. It then covers modern quantum computing concepts such as qubits, quantum circuits, superposition, and quantum gates. Several famous quantum algorithms are mentioned like Deutsch-Jozsa, Shor's algorithm for integer factorization, and Grover's algorithm for database search. The document indicates that quantum computing could enable significantly faster algorithms for problems like cryptography, search, and factorization compared to classical computers.
6. Algorithms
Loverlace & Babbage – 1810 – First Calculator and Algorithm
Bool Algebra - 1847
And - Or - Not
+Jice_Lavocat
7. +Jice_Lavocat
1943 Electronic Numerical Inte grator and Calculator. ENIAC
First Turing-complete
General
-purpose
computer
Hydrogen
bomb
Classical Computer Science
The modern binary number system was discovered by Gottfried Leibniz in 1679 and appears in his article Explication de l'Arithmétique Binaire. The full title is translated into English as the "Explanation of the Binary Arithmetic", which uses only the characters 1 and 0, with some remarks on its usefulness, and on the light it throws on the ancient Chinese figures of Fu Xi.[1] (1703). Leibniz's system uses 0 and 1, like the modern binary numeral system. As a Sinophile, Leibniz was aware of the Yijing (or I-Ching) and noted with fascination how its hexagrams correspond to the binary numbers from 0 to 111111, and concluded that this mapping was evidence of major Chinese accomplishments in the sort of philosophical mathematics he admired.[2]
The title of orefather of today's all-electronic digital computers is usually awarded to ENIAC, which stood for Electronic Numerical Integrator and Calculator. ENIAC was built at the University of Pennsylvania between 1943 and 1945 by two professors, John Mauchly and the 24 year old J. Presper Eckert, who got funding from the war department after promising they could build a machine that would replace all the "computers", meaning the women who were employed calculating the firing tables for the army's artillery guns. The day that Mauchly and Eckert saw the first small piece of ENIAC work, the persons they ran to bring to their lab to show off their progress were some of these female computers (one of whom remarked, "I was astounded that it took all this equipment to multiply 5 by 1000").
ENIAC filled a 20 by 40 foot room, weighed 30 tons, and used more than 18,000 vacuum tubes. Like the Mark I, ENIAC employed paper card readers obtained from IBM (these were a regular product for IBM, as they were a long established part of business accounting machines, IBM's forte). When operating, the ENIAC was silent but you knew it was on as the 18,000 vacuum tubes each generated waste heat like a light bulb and all this heat (174,000 watts of heat) meant that the computer could only be operated in a specially designed room with its own heavy duty air conditioning system. Only the left half of ENIAC is visible in the first picture, the right half was basically a mirror image of what's visible.