Quantum Computing

From Blindside

1 What is it
2 Impact & Maturity assessment
3 Information Assurance issues
4 Timescale
5 Examples
6 Comments (attributed)
7 Organisations
8 Documents & research papers
9 Experts (academic, practitioner)

[edit] What is it

Quantum computing is based on the unusual properties of quantum physics

Large-scale quantum computers will be able to solve certain problems exponentially faster than any classical computer.

It has been widely known for some time that certain types of encryption algorithm could be defeated by quantum computing. How ever this has not been a major concern because building a working quantum computer has proved to be extremely hard and most people have said it is still years or decades away.

At the beginning of February 2007 D-Wave Systems Inc claimed to have built a machine that had many of the characteristics of a quantum computing. D-Wave chief executive Herb Martin emphasized the machine is not a true quantum computer and is instead a kind of special-purpose machine that uses some quantum mechanics to solve problems. "Users don't care about quantum computing -- users care about application acceleration. That's our thrust," he said. D-Wave claims remain to be independently verified. But with $14 million in funding some people clearly believe in them.

A good introductory primer written in 2000 A.D. at Caltech, plus a more technical Wikipedia article and an extensive set of resources at Cambridge University UK's Center for Quantum Computing.

[edit] Impact & Maturity assessment

[Discuss assessment]

Impact 2: Quantum computing will compete with other computing methodologies, such as optical computing, hence unless it shows superior performance or better value, it will not be widely adopted. However, there is a real application for quantum computing in cryptography, hence we assign this an Impact Level of 2.

Maturity 1: Technolgy is very specialsed and requires considerable resources, and does not exist outside the laboratory.

Pace of change: A search performed on the multi-disciplinary science database Scirus.com returned a total of 786 patent results for the search term 'quantum computing' since 1900. Of that number, 92 are from 2007 and 160 from 2006, meaning that 32% of all patent activity has occurred in the past 20 months. For comparison's sake, the percentage of patent activity in the same time frame for optical computing is 11%.

[edit] Information Assurance issues

The vastly increased speeds possible with quantum computing promises an acceleration of all the IA issues brought about by conventional digital computing, which is itself still increasing in power according to Moore's Law. But quantum computing might also bring about it's own qualitatively different IA issues.

In its quest to commercialise the technology D-Wave claims quantum computing is "suited to a number of life-science applications such as bioinformatics, protein folding, drug discovery, and medical applications, as well as security applications in biometrics and identification", and also to complex supply chain and highly constrained database search applications across many industries.

[edit] Timescale

While it is difficult to estimate the timeframe for the impact of quantum computing, researchers have been estimating time frames of anything from five to twenty-five years.

[edit] Examples

IBM's Test-Tube Quantum Computer Makes History

[edit] Comments (attributed)

David Deutsch, Oxford University theoretical physicist, also credited with being the father of quantum computing, says

“The most important application of quantum computing in the future is likely to be a computer simulation of quantum systems, because that's an application where we know for sure that quantum systems in general cannot be efficiently simulated on a classical computer. This is an application where the quantum computer is ideally suited,”