Our world runs on classical computers, and the one you are currently using is one of them. Though classical computers are very fast at solving problems, they do have limitations. The way a classical computer would solve a problem is often like the way you would solve that same problem. For example, if someone handed you a shuffled deck of cards and asked you to find the queen of hearts without looking at more than one card at a time, you would probably do this by flipping them over one by one. A classical computer would do the same thing in a process known as “linear search”. The method is simple: start at the beginning of the deck and look at each card one by one until the desired one is found.

Most computers these days would be able to do this almost instantly. But what about if the deck had trillions of unique cards instead of just 52? It would take much, much longer. Well, what if computers had a better, smarter way to find the card instead of simply searching for it one by one? That’s where quantum computers come in. Quantum computers use technology that classical computers don’t have, and with that technology, they are able to solve problems with methods that classical computers can’t use. For example, instead of using linear search to find the queen of hearts, a quantum computer could use something named “Grover’s algorithm” to do so.

Grover’s algorithm is a process that a quantum computer uses to inspect every card at once. However, a quantum computer “inspecting” each card in this case is different than a classical computer’s version of actually looking at one with linear search. The quantum computer wouldn’t immediately know what every card is exactly (whether queen of hearts or something else), but it WOULD generate probabilities that suggest how likely it is that a specific card is the queen of hearts before looking at them. By creating those probabilities, the quantum computer would then have a really good idea of which cards to look at first to try to find it.

These probabilities aren’t perfect though. Think of how quantum boost sometimes highlights the wrong protein in Protein Puzzle. Just because a piece has a high probability of being correct doesn’t automatically mean it’s the right one. However, using quantum boost to tell you which piece is likely correct then looking closely at it to make sure is still much quicker than simply looking at each piece one by one. In the same way, a quantum computer using Grover’s algorithm to search for something would find it SIGNIFICANTLY faster than a classical computer using linear search.