For years, we’ve heard that in the future, our computers will be built from subatomic particles, using the rules of quantum mechanics. Things will run faster, in parallel, at lower cost… but to be honest, I’ve usually chalked this discussion up as fantasy, or something that we might, one day, see happen, but that I won’t see in the near future.  However, it turns out that quantum computing is an active area of research, one in which there have been some promising results. In this talk, William Oliver tells us about the state of quantum computing, what sorts of problems it can (or might) be used to solve, and what the challenges are moving forward.