Computers currently work using tiny silicon transistors as on/off switches to encode bits of data. Each action can have one of two values: one (on) and zero (off) in binary code.
Traditional computing is measured by the amount of information that can be contained in these zeros and ones. Either a bit is a zero or a one, not both at the same time. This limits the speed at which computation can occur.
A quantum computer is not limited to this either/or way of thinking. Its memory is made up of quantum bits or qubits – tiny particles of matter (like atoms, ions, photons or even electrons) which are the units of quantum computing. Qubits do both/and – meaning they can be in a superposition of all possible combinations of zeros and ones; in other words, they can be all those states simultaneously.
Qubits can adopt a value to represent zero, one, and zero and one at the same time, or any quantum superposition of those two qubit states. This is caused exclusively by the characteristics of quantum physics.
Qubits can be made in different ways, but the rule is that two qubits can be both in state A, both in state B, one in state A and one at state B, or vice-versa, so four probabilities in total. The state of a qubit is not known until you measure it.
In theory, a quantum computer would process all the states of a qubit at the same time, and with every qubit added to its memory size, its computational power increases exponentially. So, for three qubits, there are eight states to work with simultaneously – for four, 16; for ten, 1,024; and so on. It does not take a lot of qubits to quickly surpass the memory banks of the most powerful modern supercomputers, so for specific tasks, a quantum computer can find a solution much faster than any regular computer could.
