Quantum Computing and the Blockchain
I had never heard of David Ignatius until I saw this piece in Wired.
https://www.wired.com/2018/01/geeks-guide-david-ignatius/
followed by this earlier interview in the same magazine.
https://www.wired.com/story/david-ignatius-quantum-spy-high-tech-espionage/
I read a little bit of national security reporting, but not a whole lot, and not a lot of spy novels, either. Ignatius apparently specializes in extrapolating from his reporting assignments to near-future espionage. He has one book called The Director about an Edward Snowden-like character, which sounds interesting to me. His latest one, The Quantum Spy, is about the arms race between the US and China to secretly develop a practical quantum computer, which would allow the winner to break any encryption scheme.
This is obviously a scary concept to people who are basing their entire projected future on the idea of unbreakable encryption. Ignatius does say in the Geek's Guide to the Galaxy podcast accompanying the Wired piece that quantum decryption might also lead to quantum encryption, and in the long term it would balance out. He also thinks the comparison to the nuclear bomb is exaggerated.
“The first person who has a computer that can apply Shor’s algorithm—which posits that you can factor any number and decrypt any encryption scheme—the first person who gets that is going to be able to essentially go through every secret message, not to mention payments transaction, and for a time have mastery of that and then operate with that knowledge, so I get why people are anxious about it. But I think in the long run it’s hard—I want to say impossible—to imagine the secret of quantum computing remaining the province of one set of wizards, one country exclusively, for very long.”
I haven't read anything about quantum computing on Steemit, but a quick search shows at least 1,400 results, so I guess I'm going to be busy for a while. In the meantime, I'd be glad to read comments from more knowledgeable people.
Most computer scientists are not particularly interested in quantum computing. For example, Ivan Sutherland (former technical head of ARPA) indicating on a panel he was not impressed. He's right. Why?
Basically, quantum computing works by turning quantum mechanical uncertainty of outcome into uncertainty of time until outcome but with certain outcome. This is often statistically done. Hence talk of weak measurements here. So quantum mechanics can be used to compute, more slowly one average, with much higher precision, in a much larger phase space. Imagine one particle and a million half silvered mirrors straightened out in a line. An electronic in a classical chip will never give output so precise.
Is that faster or slower than present chips? Depends.
Electronic computer are faster in doing more computations per unit time. However they are relatively not very precise. (And further precision is increasingly costly. See the Nvidia Tesla card, one might say.)
For code breaking much fewer much higher precision operations are more useful than many more lower precision ones. It's the reverse for just about all other use cases. Greg Bear had a fun short story about quantum computing but that's science fiction, not science. (2015, ``The Machine Starts'', Future Visions, New York, Microsoft.)
For applications, you would much rather have very many low precision but error corrected operations. Preferably asynchronously, and not significantly fewer significantly higher precision ones.
Many people just pretend to work on it. Unknown to most nonacademics, the funding for mathematicians and physicists, today, if any, mostly comes from a certain three letter agency (and various friends). That comes under the premise of working on quantum computers. Most academics are very smart ... and very poor ... compared to how rich they must be ... if they were to pay for equipment and space and assistants. (PhD also stands for Poor, Helpless, and Desperate.)
Most of them are just scientists working on basic physics or mathematics. (For example, Bob Coecke, who has an excellent new book out representative of the work.) However, asking for funding to work on basic physics or mathematics is futile. You'll get five grand grants, which is cute. Governments won't fund basic science in any big way anymore. They realized thirty years ago that there's nothing really in it for them. While many researchers are loath to admit this I just don't care :)
This is why I've gotten involved with our local March for Science, as a way of pushing researchers into the political scrum, instead of hiding in their labs and complaining about the funding situation. I haven't worked up the courage to run myself yet, though.
You should do an entire post about how QC works.
Do you happen to know the name of that Neal Stephenson story, by the way?
You know what? The story is actually Greg BEAR, 2015, ``The Machine Starts'', Future Visions, New York, Microsoft. It's about a near future quantum computer called 8 ball, a 1024 qubits quantum computer based around a cloud chamber. (Stephenson wrote a near future story in a similar anthology and I confused them.)
Super-cool! Greg Bear is the one author I ever sent a fan letter to, about Darwin's Radio, one of the first SF books I ever read to get the molecular biology even close to right.
I haven't read that anthology, but I love the idea of sponsored SF. There have been a few of those anthologies, like Mike Brotherton's Diamonds in the Sky and the one ASU did.
http://www.mikebrotherton.com/diamonds/
http://csi.asu.edu/books/
The nice thing is that sponsored anthologies can be easily be done on Steemit. (Sponsored short stories, and even community written ones, are being done right now, though it's mostly flash fiction. I'm participating in some of these for fun as time permits, 50 words, 250 words.)
For longer stuff, like novellas that show up in these sorts of anthologies, or really anything by actual full time writers, things will only get rolling as soon as there are more users and readers on Steemit.
(It's not so much a question of even rewards or payment but view count. Full time authors are not doing themselves any favors publishing stories under their own names which have, for any reason, very few views, or fewer than their current market position suggests in the minds of prospects, if public view count. For reason of the social proof phenomenon and the market position concept.)
You're right. My previous unsuccessful attempts to assemble something like that have been paper-based. I've likewise become convinced that Steemit is the place to launch my company's online classes. Details to follow soon.
As for the other point, yes, although reprints from name people could be a safe way for them to try it out, maybe?
The thought of reprints hadn't occurred to me ... That is a good idea. In fact, now that I think about it, serializing reprints in parts ... now that ...
Quantum computing seems to be moving towards becoming practical:
"The tech giant has unveiled a superconducting quantum test chip with 49 qubits: enough qubits to possibly enable quantum computing that begins to exceed the practical limits of modern classical computers."
But I expect we have a few years before today's good encryption becomes easy to defeat.
Thanks. What I'm particularly interested in is the question of whether encryption using the same computer would be equally powerful, or whether there's some sort of asymmetry, like there is now, but in reverse.
Your guess is as good as mine on that one. Although it does intuitively seem like a quantum computer could create encryption that that same computer would be hard-pressed to break, the quantum world is not always intuitive; ).