An explanation of Schrödinger's cat to try and explain quantum basics....
"Basically, if you have a cat in a closed box, and poisonous gas is released. The cat is either dead, 0, or alive, 1. Until I open the box to find out, it exists in both states—a superposition. That superposition is destroyed when I measure it. But suppose I have two cats in two boxes that are correlated, and you go through the same thing. If I open one box and the cat's alive, it means the other cat is too, even if I never open the box. It's a quantum phenomenon that's a stronger correlation than you can get in classical physics, and because of that you can do something like this with quantum algorithms—change one part of the system, and the rest of it will respond accordingly, without changing the rest of the operation. That's part of the reason it's faster at certain kinds of calculations."
Full article - here
