Includes bibliographical references and index.

Computing at the Edge of Nature -- Rethinking Computers -- Shrinking Technology -- A Peek Into Quantumland -- The Qubit: Ultimate Zero and One -- Are Bits Driving Us Bankrupt? -- Quantum Computing -- Tricks of the Trade -- Quantum Memory Registers -- The prepare--evolve--measure Cycle -- Quantum Gates and Quantum Circuits -- Example of a Quantum Computation -- What Can Computers Do? -- The Turing Machine -- Quantum Turing Machines -- Universality -- Computability -- Proving versus Providing Proof -- Complexity -- Searching a Quantum Phone Book -- Breaking "Unbreakable" Codes -- The Art of Concealment -- Encryption Schemes -- Public Key Cryptography -- Code Breaking on a Classical Computer -- Code Breaking on a Quantum Computer -- Example Trace of Shor's Algorithm -- The Crapshoot Universe -- The Concept of Randomness -- Uses of Random Numbers -- Does Randomness Exist in Nature? -- Pseudorandomness: The Art of Faking It -- The Plague of Correlations -- Randomness and Quantum Computers -- The Keys to Quantum Secrets -- Some Underlying Concepts -- Polarization -- Quantum Cryptography with Polarized Photons -- Working Prototypes -- Other Approaches to Quantum Cryptography -- Teleportation: The Ultimate Ticket to Ride -- Factorizable Quantum States -- Entanglement: Non-factorizable States -- Spooky Action at a Distance -- Bell's Inequality -- Locality: For Whom the Bell Tolls -- Quantum Teleportation -- Swatting Quantum Bugs -- Laissez-Faire -- Error Correction -- Fault-Tolerant Computing -- Topological Quantum Computing.