Quantum Information

The foundations of an information processing theory can be constructed by the procedure we followed in the previous section:

1.

Define the basic unit of information.

2.

Give the means for processing one unit.

3.

Describe how multiple units can be combined.

4.

Give the means for processing multiple units.

5.

Show how to convert the content of any of the extant units to classical information.

Note that the last step was not required for classical information processing.

In this section, we follow the general procedure for defining an information processing theory to introduce quantum information processing. A simple example that exhibits the advantages of quantum information is given in Sect. 2.8. A version of the quantum factoring algorithm is described in Sect. 2.10.