G. J. Milburn

Although it was a good book, I really do not understand the point of writing books like this. Too complicated for someone without basic knowledge of quantum theory and computer science, and probably too basic for someone familiar with those two fields. Having mentioned and explained things like GHZ state, Bell state, Hilbert space, EPR paradox, Turing-Church principle, Feynman diagram... and at the same time explaining how do you convert decimal numbers to binary and add them, in the same book, is rather silly and pointless. And also in one chapter he used certain terms like they were interchangeable, while they're not.

Maybe I'll have better luck with Mermin, Nielsen, Bell and Zeiliger, while waiting for Makarov to write something.… (mer)

Unfortunately I jumped into this book without reading any reviews on it first. It was pretty dry with a few interesting sections. I really just wanted to understand what a quantum computer was and finally came across this in the last chapter: "At the time of writing, no quantum computer exists anywhere in the world". Bummer.

The book is a fairly in-depth discussion of the theory, and spends quite a bit of time discussing the behavior of beam splitters and quantum entanglement, quantum software, and 3 different possible implementations of a quantum computer. It reads like a textbook in that it brings you slowly into the theory without giving much motivation or why you should care. Overall it was just a bit too deep for me and I’ll scout around for a more recent and higher level book that talks about how quantum computers are actually built.

(I eventually read a better book on this subject: "Quest for the Quantum Computer" by Julian Brown)… (mer)