Byte explicitly denotes a sequence of eight bits, eliminating the ambiguity of the byte. The term "byte" was coined by Werner Buchholz in June 1956, during the early design phase for the IBM Stretch computer, which had addressing to the bit and variable field length (VFL) instructions with a byte size encoded in the instruction. It is a deliberate respelling of "bite" to avoid accidental mutation to "bit". Another origin of "byte" for bit groups smaller than a machine's word size (and in particular groups of four bits) is on record by Louis G. Dooley, who claimed he coined the term
Quantum computing measurement, collapsing the system of qubits into one of the formula_2 eigenstates, where each qubit is zero or one, decomposing into a classical state. The outcome can, therefore, be at most formula_1 classical bits of information (or, if the algorithm did not end with a measurement, the result is an unobserved quantum state). Quantum algorithms are often probabilistic, in that they provide the correct solution only with a certain known probability. Note that the term non-deterministic computing must not be used in that case to mean probabilistic (computing) because the term non-deterministic has a different meaning in computer science. An