ABSTRACT
Information as accessed by the human mind, and the myriad ways of processing it, is what has set humankind apart in the animal world. The ability to use the physical systems around us to encode and then to process information has been evolving in leaps and bounds ever since the dawn of our race! The earliest form of computation was probably in the form of account-keeping by counting pebbles or on the fingers. This developed into the abacus, writing symbols, the computing machine, and now, a laptop or a supercomputer: everywhere we represent information by means of a physical system, and perform manipulations on that system to process the information in many desired ways, including communication. The stress here is on the realization that the basis of information is a physical system. The more advanced that system is and the set of rules it functions on, the more capable our means of information processing and communication. When the underlying physical system used for encoding and processing information is a quantum system, we have quantum information processing.
