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NSA and Army On Quest For Quantum Physics Jackpot
coondoggie sends this excerpt from NetworkWorld:
"The US Army Research Office and the National Security Agency (NSA) are together looking for some answers to their quantum physics questions. ... The Army said quantum algorithms that are developed should focus on constructive solutions [PDF] for specific tasks, and on general methodologies for expressing and analyzing algorithms tailored to specific problems — though they didn't say what those specific tasks were ... 'Investigators should presuppose the existence of a fully functional quantum computer and consider what algorithmic tasks are particularly well suited to such a machine. A necessary component of this research will be to compare the efficiency of the quantum algorithm to the best existing classical algorithm for the same problem.'"
NSA and Army wants quantum computations researchers to do exactly what they have been doing for the last 15 years.
Why must people with no idea on a particular subject always be in charge of the budgets around a particular subject?
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A chemist, a physicist and a mathematician are stranded on a desert island, and all they have is a can of beans. They need to open the can so that they can eat, so they each in turn set about devising a method to open the can.
The chemist comes up with a method that involves making seawater acidic enough to get the top off (while neutralizing the acid with some basic coconut juice from a nearby tree.)
The physicist comes up with a complicated rock apparatus to basically smash open the can.
The mathematician scratches his head, and walks around the beach for a while considering the problem. Finally, he comes and sits down next to his fellow castaways and says, "Assume a can opener..."
"Investigators should presuppose the existence of a fully functional quantum computer," huh?
...?
Does anyone else here read this as "NSA has a nifty, shiny new toy and are looking for ways to use it"
Paleotechnologist and connoisseur of pretty shiny things.
because they have all of the money, wasn't that easy?
Because people who do understand subjects like this usually have a hard time deciding their budget shouldn't be unlimited.
I know, because I happen to be one of those people. I'm just saying I can see how it might be seen as a conflict of interest to expect people to limit their own budgets (when those budgets).
I like your thinking. I would like to subscribe to your newsletter.
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Also likely, from this 'Investigators should presuppose the existence of a fully functional quantum computer' is that they /already have/ a fully functional quantum computer, and are just trying to figure out what to do with the darned thing.
Jim "well it is this new quantum encryption software, everytime I open a new subject the encrypted output window is already full of encrypted text and I havent even typed anything.
IT Support "ah yes that is normal, it is a side effect of quantum state data transfer, you know, it arrives before it leaves etc, just ignore it"
Jim "out of curriosity has anyone ever tried decrypting the text before they have actually written the message"
IT Support "God no, dont ever do that, laws of time and space become screwed up, the last guy who tried that vanished with a sucking noise and was replaced by a plush cookie monster toy"
Can't a quantum computer [...] break any encryption instantly by only actually arriving at the destination assigned?
No. Quantum computers can theoretically solve some problems faster than classical computers. Among these (and perhaps most famously) is factoring -- see Shor's Algorithm. Fast factorization breaks RSA encryption, which is what everyone uses.
It is not known whether quantum computers can in general solve problems exponentially faster than classical ones. Further, it is not known for most important problems how to take advantage of quantum computers to achieve dramatic speedups (or even if it's possible). It seems that NSA and the Army want to know more about this.
Quantum computing has been getting quite a lot of grant money in recent years, ever since IBM's Peter Shor found a quantum algorithm to factor products of large primes in polynomial time, threatening to break a lot of public key cryptosystems. The money that this unlocked has supported a lot of neat basic physics research, but at present Shor's algorithm remains the only known killer app for quantum computers. It's about time somebody asked for more applications. If none are found soon, funding for QC will probably drop quite a bit, and probably should.