The dream of quantum computers has moved a small step closer with the first successful demonstration of a quantum algorithm in an experiment and a novel proposal to build a quantum computer based on the silicon technology used in existing computers. Quantum computers exploit the ability of quantum particles to be in a superposition of two states at the same time and have the potential to outperform classical computers by many orders of magnitudes in certain tasks. For example, whereas searching the entire web (which contains 8 trillion bytes of data) for a keyword would take a month using a classical computer, such a search might take less than half an hour on a quantum computer.