I realise it was a comment in jest but this area is more significant than
many of us may think.
If quantum computation comes of age, cryptography will have to change
enormously since we are faced with potential new technology that overcomes
classical limits underlying cryptographic systems, eg factorising very
large numbers. I am referring to the enormous parallelism that may be
achieved through superposition of values in quantum bit based registers.
See
http://eve.physics.ox.ac.uk/qcweb/intro/intro.html
and I believe
http://www.qubit.org
for relevant information.
Hope it is of interest
Stan
At 08:46 01/12/1999 +0000, Ben Laurie wrote:
>People may be interested in last week's Nature article, D. Gottesman and
>I.L. Chuang, "Demonstrating the viability of universal quantum
>computation using teleportation and single-qubit operations", Nature
>402, 390-392.
>
>One thing that should make software authors jump for joy is that the
>method involves quantum software that is hard to make yet is consumed
>during the computation. Enforcable software leasing, woo! [1]
>
>Whether it is of any significance that the authors work for Microsoft
>and IBM respectively I leave to the reader to decide.
>
>Cheers,
>
>Ben.
>
>[1] No, I don't think this is a good thing.
>
>--
>http://www.apache-ssl.org/ben.html
>
>"My grandfather once told me that there are two kinds of people: those
>who work and those who take the credit. He told me to try to be in the
>first group; there was less competition there."
> - Indira Gandhi
