I know pretty much nothing of the physics and very little of the logic, but having listened to a few talks from the CS side of the field, it mostly looks like a

I know pretty much nothing of the physics and very little of the logic, but having listened to a few talks from the CS side of the field, it mostly looks like a combination of: - Different hardware. This boils down to different gates/primitive operations, ala [1]. There are currently lots of different proposed methods of how to build the hardware, but I don't know that much about how the physical circuits in a traditional computer work, either. - Different algorithms. See e.g. Shor's [2]. I think there are only one or two others that have been proven to be more efficiently solvable by quantum means, so a lot more work needs to be done in this area. The field is in its extreme infancy, and I think it will always be more challenging to program quantum computers by a fairly wide margin. [1] http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_gate http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_gate [2] http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shors_algorithm http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shors_algorithm