Quantum computing has made great strides in recent years but it is not a new idea. Quantum physics was developed in the 1920s and 1930s. In the early 1980s, physicist Richard Feynman encouraged computer scientists to develop new models of computation based on quantum physics, which showed the promise of performing computation in a different and more efficient manner. In the 1990s, the field of quantum computing progressed when the first algorithms were developed that could run more efficiently on quantum computers than on classic computers. In the 2000s, practical quantum computers began to be able to implement some of the theoretical algorithms from the 1990s for very small inputs.
Important historical developments in quantum computing include:
- Feynman's introduction of quantum computing (1981-1982)
- The demonstration that quantum computing can perform better than classic computing (1985)
- Shor's algorithm (1994)
- Quantum error correction (1995)
- Grover's algorithm (1996)
- The quantum threshold theorem (1999)
- Cross pollination from different quantum computing systems in recent years