I understand in plain terms superposition and entanglement, but I'm very unclear how either of these could work as a means to increase computation power.
A helpful metaphor is that of the maze. A normal computer must work through every path of the maze to find the exit. If it takes a wrong turn, it must start over. This is time-consuming. On the other hand, a quantum computer can work through every path simultaneously. Obviously, this is more efficient.
But that metaphor doesn't explain how superposition makes this possible because it doesn't describe how a quantum computer would execute the calculation/process.
So what I'm looking for is an explanation of that, how does a quantum computer execute a process by leveraging superposition?
That qubits collapse under observation seems to make the whole thing useless.
Let's say I have a dictionary of possible passwords. One password is correct. I can create a function that loops through every word in the dictionary and attempts to use it as the password.
The password is stored in a variable called "temp". In a quantum world, if "temp" was made of qubits, it could have a multitude of values at once, drastically reducing the number of times we would need to run the password test.
But in order for the test to execute, wouldn't we need to observe the value of "temp" and therefore collapse the potential states?
