Thoughts on Quantum Computing

Inter­est­ing art­icle in Wired News where they inter­view David Deutsch who they refer to as the Father of Quantum Com­put­ing. He has a kind of low key but inter­est­ing take on the recent demon­stra­tion of a real, live 16 qubit quantum com­puter by D-Wave, a Cana­dian com­pany based out of Vancouver.

Low key inso­far as he doesn’t seem par­tic­u­larly enthused about the poten­tial of quantum com­puters, other than per­haps their abil­ity to be used to sim­u­late quantum sys­tems and of course encryp­tion:

Deutsch: It’s not any­where near as big a revolu­tion as, say, the inter­net, or the intro­duc­tion of com­puters in the first place. The prac­tical applic­a­tion, from a ordin­ary consumer’s point of view, are just quantitative.

One field that will be revo­lu­tion­ized is cryp­to­graphy. All, or nearly all, exist­ing cryp­to­graphic sys­tems will be rendered insec­ure, and even ret­ro­spect­ively insec­ure, in that mes­sages sent today, if some­body keeps them, will be pos­sible to decipher … with a quantum com­puter as soon as one is built.

Most fields won’t be revo­lu­tion­ized in that way.

For­tu­nately, the already exist­ing tech­no­logy of quantum cryp­to­graphy is not only more secure than any exist­ing clas­sical sys­tem, but it’s invul­ner­able to attack by a quantum com­puter. Any­one who cares suf­fi­ciently much about secur­ity ought to be insti­tut­ing quantum cryp­to­graphy wherever it’s tech­nic­ally feasible.

Apart from that, as I said, math­em­at­ical oper­a­tions will become easier. Algorithmic search is the most import­ant one, I think. Com­puters will become a little bit faster, espe­cially in cer­tain applic­a­tions. Sim­u­lat­ing quantum sys­tems will become import­ant because quantum tech­no­logy will become import­ant gen­er­ally, in the form of nanotechnology.

(my emphasis). Inter­est­ing thought about being ret­ro­spect­ively insec­ure. Par­tic­u­larly given spy agen­cies have, in the past, been suf­fi­ciently bold to trans­mit encoded mes­sages on eas­ily access­ible short­wave fre­quen­cies.

I ima­gine the spook shops already have their pur­chase orders in for quantum crypto stuff (or have developed it already intern­ally). Was a bit sur­prised by the state­ment above regard­ing exist­ing tech­no­logy for quantum com­put­ing. I had heard of some demos a while back, but didn’t real­ize that there are actu­ally sev­eral com­pan­ies offer­ing quantum cryp­to­graphy products.

related:

1. D-Wave’s Quantum Com­put­ing Demo
2. A Real Quantum Com­puter  —  This Week!
3. cana­dian export con­trols now apply to quantum cryptography
4. Fair Use and the DMCA
5. Microsoft Pat­ents RSS. Or Tries To. Maybe.