ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on understanding the essential features of quantum computing and its possible interfaces with soft computing techniques. Computing in any form involves storage and retrieval of information and processing it. The fundamental unit of storing information on a classical computer is called a "bit". The special features of quantum mechanics that quantum computing exploits to achieve what is unachievable in classical computing are "quantum parallelism", "quantum interference", and the notion of "entangled states" or the idea of "quantum entanglement". Quantum computing or a quantum computer leverages certain special features of quantum mechanics to accomplish very complex tasks with incredible speeds unthinkable in the classical world of computation, thereby reducing the computational complexity of these problems to manageable limits. The automatic program evolution techniques discussed so far can also be used to evolve quantum computing programs. The quantum circuit designed by Deutsch was the first ever concrete demonstration of the greater-than-classical power of quantum computing.
