News from the White House this morning:
Today, President Biden will sign two Presidential directives that will advance national initiatives in quantum information science (QIS), signaling the Biden-Harris Administration’s commitment to this critical and emerging technology. Together, the two directives lay the groundwork for continued American leadership in an enormously promising field of science and technology, while mitigating the risks that quantum computers pose to America’s national and economic security.
The United States has long been a global leader in the development of new technologies, like QIS. QIS is a broad field of science and engineering. Quantum computers, one of the many promising applications of QIS, are not a replacement to traditional computers. Rather, they are a fundamentally different kind of computer, with the ability to analyze information in ways that traditional computers cannot.
I would really, really enjoy seeing President Biden explain what quantum computing is to the public, and why it is so important.
As it was recently explained to me, almost all computers operate on a binary system – all instructions, all lines of code, all programs are, in some form, a giant pile of ones and zeros in particular orders that tell the computer what to do. Think of a coin always being either heads or tails – it is always one or the other; for today’s computers, all information boils down to ones and zeros. But a quantum computer — which by the way, looks nothing like a regular computer, it looks more like a giant twisty coil of copper plumbing — can use ones, zeros, or something in between — to take the coin and spin it, so that is is both at once.
What difference does that make? It means the computer can do calculations exponentially faster than today’s computers. Not just a little faster; something like “158 million times faster than the most sophisticated supercomputer we have in the world today. It is a device so powerful that it could do in four minutes what it would take a traditional supercomputer 10,000 years to accomplish.”
You might be thinking, big deal, today’s computers are really fast. But the ability to run calculations so much faster makes a huge difference in a lot of areas — and one area of particular concern to the U.S. government is cybersecurity.
Almost all modern computer security, from your home network to the NSA, operates on a password or code that would take a really long time to figure out through trial-and-error. It’s like your bicycle combination lock with a combination that is hundreds of letters and numbers long. If you needed to open a three-digit bicycle combination lock without using the key, you would have to try up to 1,000 possible combinations of numbers. It would take a while, but you could eventually do it. But that approach just isn’t feasible for most computer or online security; it would take decades or centuries or even longer to try every possible combination to most modern encryption programs.
Except if you develop a really good quantum computer, you can run through all the potential combinations to the “lock” really fast because it’s not doing them one at a time. “A quantum computer does not have to wait for one process to end before it can begin another, it can do them at the same time.” It’s like trying every combination from 0-0-0 to 9-9-9 on that bicycle lock at the same time.
Once you understand this, you begin to realize why it is so ominous that China is dumping enormous resources into developing quantum computers. Keep in mind, quantum computers have to operate at extremely cold temperatures, just above absolute zero, something around negative 460 degrees Fahrenheit. People have built simple, small-scale quantum computers; the race is on to build bigger, more advanced ones — technology developers are working against the limits of physics.
Once someone has a sufficiently powerful, stable, and working quantum computer… well, at that point, there really isn’t much on the Internet that the quantum computer couldn’t hack open. The first country to develop a full-scale advanced quantum computer will have a skeleton key to open up every network and computer file in any other country’s systems, and an enormous advantage in all kinds of conflicts. A lot of spy movies and novels have revolved around a gadget MacGuffin that can hack into any computer system in the world. Quantum computing is a pretty close proximity of that.