  There has been no lack of coverage in the past few years in scientific
journals of the topic of quantum computation. Rightly so, as this is a novel
idea with--so far--at least one very important practical application (prime
factorisation) as soon as the technology can accommodate reasonably sized
computations. Interest in quantum computing has been sparked by both the
realization that increasing miniaturisation will eventually bring computer
scientists face-to-face with quantum effects, and by the grasping of the
potential for massive parallelism inherent in the Hilbert space representation
of quantum systems and in the special effects of quantum entanglement.
