Miscellaneous

Quantum computers store and process information using quantum mechanical states. This video by futurist Christopher Barnatt explains what this means and the future implications.

For more information see "Quantum Computing"

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Brad Templeton discusses the vast computational power that a quantum computer could have, provided that someone were to build one. He compares this theoretical computer with a machine being marketed as a quantum computer, the D-Wave. Templeton is a Board Member and Former Chair of Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Track Chair for Computing at Singularity University.

Transcript: Most people know or remember from school that underneath it all reality is not based on billiard balls and things that match our experience in the physical world, but on a system called quantum mechanics. And the rules of quantum mechanics are rather strange and not very intuitive to us and so they don't act like the higher level rules that we've built computers on so far. So there's a bunch of research to study whether or not you can do things in quantum mechanics that perform computation in ways that we can't do at the level of mechanical systems or electronic systems that we use. In particular it seems possible in theory to do very, very huge amounts of computing in quantum mechanics, sort of as some people would imagine it as though you were tapping into millions and trillions and billions of parallel universes and having computations take place in all those parallel universes until an answer is found in one and is revealed to you in your universe.

Well, that's a little bit mystical. I don't know if anyone can give you the true answer on that, but there are people who believe that they can make a computer that uses these properties of quantum computing to solve some very, very specific problems much, much faster than the way we solve them today with computers. And when I say much, much faster, so much faster that if you were to turn the entire universe into an ordinary computer like the one on your desk, it still could not outcompete the quantum computer at solving these problems. Now, one of the problems that can be solved this way, in theory, yet no one has built this computer that we know of, but one of the problems that can be solved is a math problem that we believe to be hard, which is to say factoring really large numbers. And because we believe that problem to be really hard, we have used that as the lock in all of the computer security that we use in the world today, almost all of it. And if that lock can be broken, because the quantum computer makes easy what everyone else believe to be incredibly hard, the person with the quantum computer could break most of the cryptography, all the traffic you see going across the web, a lot of the financial transaction traffic, a lot of the authentication, all of that stuff becomes vulnerable to a computer that's done that.

Now, Edward Snowden has told us that the NSA does indeed have a research project to build this, and I actually feel good about that because Snowden didn't tell us they already had one. Now, the way you will know that someone has a quantum computer like this if it's made public, is you look out your window on Wall Street and if you see bankers and stock people running screaming in terror waving their arms you know that someone has developed a quantum computer. There are a few other things that could cause that. By the way many people are skeptical that it ever will happen. There's some people who think something will always stand in the way of this being true. But other people are very serious about it. Now, there's a second type of device, which is also being called a quantum computer made by a company up in Vancouver called D-Wave. The D-Wave Computer solves other specialty problems and not the one that affects cryptography. It's, for example, good at solving a fairly hard problem. Imagine you're out in a mountain range and you're in a valley somewhere in a mountain range and you're asked what's the lowest of valley in this mountain range? Now, if you had to solve that yourself you'd have to like climb to the top of all the mountains and look down because in your valley it's easy to find the bottom of your valley, but you don't know if there's another valley over next to you that's lower or not...[TRANSCRIPT TRUNCATED]

Directed/Produced by Jonathan Fowler, Elizabeth Rodd, and Dillon Fitton

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Microsoft researcher Krysta Svore shares her passion for quantum computing, and how and why her team is creating a unique software architecture for quantum computing -- a new environment that contains complex algorithms for quantum circuit manipulation and optimization, and for layout on various quantum architectures, in addition to many other development tools. Her goal is to determine what the first generation of quantum computers can do for us by building software tools that unlock the potential of quantum computing, while continuing to explore the infinite number of open research problems that someday might overcome today’s technology limitations.

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NIST physicist Ray Simmonds discusses his work in quantum physics and NIST's efforts to create a quantum computer. He also describes a qubit and a quantum bus, along with explaining how he was inspired to become a scientist.

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Theoretical physicists John Preskill and Spiros Michalakis describe how things are different in the Quantum World and how that can lead to powerful Quantum Computers.

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The reservoir of possibilities offered by the fundamental laws of Nature, is the key point in the development of science and technology. Quantum computing is the next step on the road to broaden our perspective from which we currently look at the Universe. The movie shows the history of progress in this fascinating field of science, introduces the most promising models and algorithms, explains the advantages of quantum computers over classical solutions, and finally presents wonderful people thanks to which the quality of our lives is constantly being improved.

Even if you don't want to understand the video, please watch till the end at least to realise how big is the human thirst for knowledge.

PLEASE TAKE NOTICE that all of the necessary information about the authors who were kind enough to share their work, are displayed in the end credits.

Captions already available.

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Computers have been working in a similar fashion for the past 80 years. But that could be about to change.

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From AI to genetics, new materials to pharmaceuticals, quantum computers could solve problems that are too hard for normal computers. Jeremy O'Brien, a Professor at the University of Bristol, introduces his a blueprint for a quantum computer that uses light, requires no exotic operating conditions, and should be in production this decade.

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Three decades have passed since Richard Feynman first proposed devising a "quantum computer"? founded on the laws of quantum physics to achieve computational speed-ups over classical methods. In that time, quantum algorithms have been developed that offer fast solutions to problems in a variety of fields including number theory, chemistry, and materials science. To execute such algorithms on a quantum device will require extensive quantum and classical "software"?. One of the grand challenges for the computer science community is the design and implementation of a software architecture to control and program quantum hardware. This session will address how to build a scalable, reliable quantum computer: What are the quantum and classical resource requirements? How do we protect the device against errors? How do we program the quantum computer? It will highlight recent advances in quantum device architectures, error correction, and software design tools, and pose crucial open questions in quantum computer science.

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A Quantum Leap - introducing the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology's Center for Quantum Science, Matter and Engineering
How quantum science will transform our future.

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I will report on recent results about quantum algorithms for solving computational problems in number theory. I will show how they impact the security of certain post-quantum cryptosystems. Shor's quantum algorithm for factoring large integers and solving the discrete logarithm problem has been the motivation for an entire new area of research in cryptology: namely "post-quantum" cryptography. It consists of designing new cryptographic primitives which will resist attacks from quantum computers. In a recent work in collaboration with Fang Song, I presented a quantum polynomial time algorithm for solving the so-called "Principal Ideal Problem" (among other things) in arbitrary fields. We will see how this impacts the security of some ring-based proposals for quantum resistant cryptography. In collaboration with David Jao and Anirudh Sankar, I also described a quantum algorithm which finds an isogeny between two given supersingular curves over a finite field, a hard problem on which some post-quantum cryptosystem rely. Finally, if there is enough time, I'll mention some recent work on factorization.

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Advances at Google, Intel, and several research groups indicate that computers with previously unimaginable power are finally within reach.

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10:50 AM–11:20 AM | Xiaodi Wu – Quantum Query Complexity of Entropy Estimation

11:25 AM–11:55 AM | Stephanie Wehner – Quantum Internet: The Certifiable Road Ahead

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In 1982, Richard Feynman proposed to use a computer founded on the laws of quantum physics to simulate physical systems and achieve exponential computational speed-ups over conventional, digital computers.

In the more than thirty years since, quantum computers have shown promise to solve problems in number theory, chemistry, and materials science that would otherwise take longer than the lifetime of the universe to solve on an exascale classical machine.

Such solutions, for example, will break RSA and thereby invalidate our current encryption techniques, combat global warming, improve artificial fertilizer production, and help design room-temperature superconductors.

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Seth Lloyd is a professor of mechanical engineering and physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He refers to himself as a "quantum mechanic".

8.22.16

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Quantum computers could revolutionise cybersecurity, medicine, finance and many other industries. They will do complex calculations in seconds that would take normal computers millions of years.
Scientists at the University of Sussex have now created a blueprint for a quantum computer the size of a football pitch that could be operational in the next ten years.

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A large-scale quantum computer would be able to solve problems that existing classical computers would take much longer than the age of the universe to solve. This would have dramatic implications for cryptography, chemistry, material science, nuclear physics and probably other areas that are still un- known. But what about quantum computers that will be available in the next few years?

Nov 6th, 2016

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