| Qubits are the computer science equivalent of "Schrödinger's cat." It is impossible to tell whether the cat in the box is alive (1) or dead (0) unless you actually look inside the box (see illustration below). The cat is both dead and alive in an "overlapped" state, just like a qubit. This cat, both dead and alive until you peek, may strike you as being ambiguous and inconvenient, but its overlapped state until viewed is, in fact, thought to be very convenient, and represents the key to data processing methods (algorithms) of the computers of the future.
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