Summary

You can represent bits and bit sequences as vectors. You can represent operators on bits as matrices. To combine bits, combine operators, and apply operators to bits, you use matrix multiplication and the tensor product.

In truth, most people who deal with bit-level concepts don’t do matrix calculations. There are other, less cumbersome ways to understand bits and bit operations, but quantum computing deals with things that are more complicated than bits. Quantum computing deals with quantum bits, also known as qubits, and matrices give us excellent insights into the workings of qubits.

The next chapter extends your understanding of matrices from bits to qubits. In that chapter, you begin investigating the weird world of quantum computing.