Scientists are working to make quantum computing a reality

For six or seven decades, computers have been based on processing electronic 1s and 0s. Now, computer scientists are breaking out of that paradigm in strange new directions, as they seek new ways to tackle problems that digital computers can’t easily solve. One approach is quantum computing, in which the computer takes advantage of the ambiguous, “quantum” states of matter. After years of being mostly hypothetical quantum computing is edging into the real world: One startup, D-Wave, is building quantum computers that, it hopes, can determine a variety of possible solutions simultaneously and save energy by speeding up the computing process by many orders of magnitude. That could be useful for cryptography, among other applications.