In Part 2 of the Tech Lessons Series by Bill Harris, get ready to unravel the mystery of quantum computing? Brace yourselves as we, your hosts, and our esteemed guest, Bill Harris, take you on a whirlwind tour of this fascinating technology that's set to redefine the future. Possessing the potential to disrupt major industries and even cryptography, quantum computing is a topic you certainly can't afford to miss.
Imagine a computer that can process information at superluminal speeds. That's the magic of quantum computing! From its application in fields as diverse as healthcare and AI to the challenges it poses, we've got it all covered in this episode. But it doesn't stop there. We discuss the potential threat quantum computers pose to current encryption technologies and the prodigious task of developing quantum-safe encryption techniques.
Finally, we examine the present landscape of quantum computing, key players in the field, and IBM's quantum roadmap. Are you curious about how a linguist might relate to all this tech talk? Listen in as Alan, an IT professional, ties it all together with his son's choice of major. We wrap up with a hilarious segment discussing our favorite physicists and resources, where you may just find your next good read! Get ready for a deep dive into a future shaped by quantum computing!
In Part 2 of the Tech Lessons Series by Bill Harris, get ready to unravel the mystery of quantum computing? Brace yourselves as we, your hosts, and our esteemed guest, Bill Harris, take you on a whirlwind tour of this fascinating technology that's set to redefine the future. Possessing the potential to disrupt major industries and even cryptography, quantum computing is a topic you certainly can't afford to miss.
Imagine a computer that can process information at superluminal speeds. That's the magic of quantum computing! From its application in fields as diverse as healthcare and AI to the challenges it poses, we've got it all covered in this episode. But it doesn't stop there. We discuss the potential threat quantum computers pose to current encryption technologies and the prodigious task of developing quantum-safe encryption techniques.
Finally, we examine the present landscape of quantum computing, key players in the field, and IBM's quantum roadmap. Are you curious about how a linguist might relate to all this tech talk? Listen in as Alan, an IT professional, ties it all together with his son's choice of major. We wrap up with a hilarious segment discussing our favorite physicists and resources, where you may just find your next good read! Get ready for a deep dive into a future shaped by quantum computing!
You are listening to the audit presented by IT Audit Labs. Welcome back to the audit everyone. We're talking again with Bill Harris. So, bill, thanks for coming on. And today we're talking about quantum computing. I think that's a topic that most of us probably don't know a lot about. Alan's back with us, alan, hopefully you can stay the whole time this time. Thanks for coming back in, nick, always good to have you, of course, and Scott too. Last week, scott, we started talking about classical compute with Bill, and Bill's got a three-part series of classical compute quantum and then the future of storage, so looking at things like DNA and crystalline for storage. So, bill, we'll turn it over to you and we'll pepper you with questions. Maybe we just get a quick background. For those who maybe didn't hear the previous podcast, bill, do you want to just give a little insight into who you are and what you do?
Speaker 2:Yeah, sure you bet. So my name is Bill Harris and I do security architecture, and one of the things that I focus on is security and general technology futures. So today I'll be talking about the future of quantum between now and 2023.
Speaker 1:Now, in 2023?.
Speaker 2:Oh, I'm sorry, Now in 2030.
Speaker 1:2030, got it Cool. And then, alan, you're relatively new to this too. Do you want to just give a quick who you are, besides being apparently a Wisconsin fan?
Speaker 3:Yeah, so I'm wearing this in honor of my youngest son, who graduates high school tomorrow. He's decided to attend the University of Wisconsin, so yet again, my kid and my money will be going to the University of Wisconsin. Congratulations.
Speaker 4:He'll be the second one.
Speaker 3:Yeah, he'll be the second one that I had go through that school. I'm Alan Green IT professional, been in the industry going on practically 30 years now. My current role is I manage a team of system engineers at a company that developed software and does some work in the credit industry, and I own that total responsibility for their infrastructure.
Speaker 1:And last time, Alan, you were drinking what you were calling iced tea.
Speaker 3:It was iced tea and a solo cup. But I got to admit. That's why I left the name of my employer out of this introduction, just in case someone makes an accusation again that I was drinking more than iced tea. It's not tied to anybody because it was iced tea, my friend.
Speaker 1:We just happened to be talking about bourbon at the same time, and Scott, nick, bill and Alan are all fans of bourbon. Are you as well?
Speaker 4:I like bourbon and I was going to give Alan props for pouring bourbon into an iced tea can so that he could drink it throughout the recording of this episode.
Speaker 1:All right, there you go. So, alan, when did he decide to go to Wisconsin? It?
Speaker 3:was several weeks back almost better than a month right, he applied to a host of schools, got accepted into all of them that he applied to, and then it became the OK what can dad and mom afford? And as we tick down the list, we felt very comfortable with University of Wisconsin. As I mentioned earlier, his older sister graduated from there back in 2019-ish. Yeah, I'm a great parent. Don't know when my kids graduated college. Yeah, I'll own that. So anyway, yeah, it'll be fun. It'll be fun to have another one there. It's a great school. I'm looking forward to road trips. We can go watch some Badger football and hang out on the campuses.
Speaker 1:What's he going to study?
Speaker 3:You know what he is? Linguistics. He has an uncanny ability to grasp languages and so he has studied Chinese since he was I don't know, fifth grade, sixth grade, and then he just picked up French on the side. So he's conversational in Chinese and damn near conversational in French. So he wants to do something in linguistics and then maybe get out and you know, I don't know work for the UN or become something that requires him to leverage those skill sets CIA. And potentially, yeah, potentially CIA.
Speaker 1:Very cool for him. I heard recently that the Space Force and the Air Force I know it's funny to say the Space Force. I know right, yep, steve Carroll or whatever right. But yeah, I think those two are, from a military perspective, top for cyber is what I heard. Not that all the other branches don't have cyber capabilities, but I think there's. They're at least recruiting maybe more for cyber in in the Air Force and the Space Force.
Speaker 3:So I thought you were about to tie that to linguistics, and Steve Carroll and company were looking for people that could speak Martian. They ventured into the outer space, so like where you took that?
Speaker 2:you know the US has actually had a Space Force for a while. It's just wasn't called as much. It was called out in the previous administration, the prior to that. It was Just caught kind of quietly buried and in other agencies, so it's not to draw attention to it. All right, can we see my screen?
Speaker 3:Yes, we can.
Speaker 2:All right. So for today's agenda, this is what I'm gonna go through today. We're gonna talk about really kind of quantum and get you introduced from beginning to end, talk about where it's going. I'll kick off with talking about what exactly is quantum computing. That we'll move to why it matters. We'll go through some use cases and talk about where quantum is being used today and really what benefits it brings. There are also challenges to come with quantum, so we'll go into that and tell you what's holding it back a little bit and what we're trying to do about it. I'll talk about the elephant in the room, right? So quantum is always discussed in terms of cryptography, it seems, and what it's going to do to encryption in the future. We'll absolutely dive into that and then we'll start to wrap up and talk about where quantum exists today, what countries are using it, what companies have it, and go into the roadmap from there and then wrap up.
Speaker 2:So first, well, let's take off with some basics around quantum computer. So quantum was first envisioned in the 1980s by two scientists, richard Feynman and Yuri Manin. They were seeking to solve a basic problem of physics, which is that Was really tough for physicists to model Quantum mechanics on classical computers. So they realized that they would have to build a quantum computer to model quantum problems. That's why it was born. So in 1998 the first quantum computer was made.
Speaker 2:It had two qubits, and A qubit is the same thing as a regular bit and so far as it can represent a zero or a one and it is, it's it's nothing more than two superconductors on either side of an insulator.
Speaker 2:But in addition to representing a zero or a one, by the rules of quantum mechanics you can also represent both at the same time, and we're going to be coming back to that concept a lot and talking about why that matters. But I'll touch one of the little bit here and say that in terms of how you can relate a qubit to a regular bit, and qubits take the value of Two to the end bits. So if you've got ten qubits that can take on the values of about a thousand, 24 regular bits. If you've got 20 qubits that can take on the value of a million bits. So if you've got a hundred qubits, they can take on the values of one point two, seven, non million bits. So here you start to see the power of the superposition and and how qubits are just exponentially more powerful than a regular bit because they can do all of that stuff at the same time. We'll talk more about that coming up.
Speaker 1:Guys, I have a confession. I made it through two bullet points before I got lost. I feel like I'm in all in son's Chinese class.
Speaker 2:Oh, don't worry, We'll get you caught up, we'll get you caught up. So we're gonna kind of be revisiting these, these, these ideas a little bit and at the end of this, if you want to know more about it, there's some great material on the internet there's. There's plenty of plenty of stuff to brush up. Important to know that quantum computers are not programmed like a regular machine like you can't just kind of pony up there and and program it with, you know, c, sharp or, or, or cobalt or something like that, right? So it requires algorithms to be fed to it and we'll talk about one of those algorithms is when we get into cryptography. But Scientists are still developing, and particularly mathematicians are still developing algorithms to feed quantum computers, and We'll talk a little bit also about why that matters and how that's different. Now, before I advance it and kind of go into some of the details, let's get introduced to the quantum computer. So For most of these slides you're going to see a quantum computer on your right side and it's all going to be different ones, but they all kind of look the same. So here's what we're looking at here.
Speaker 2:The quantum computer is usually a multi-tiered model and I'm going to talk about why this in just a moment. But you'll see that all these wires coming down here, that's called a chandelier because it looks like a chandelier, so they gave it a catchy name like that and these are a combination of signal cables as well as Superconducting circuits. The little these bars you see kind of coming down the center here and these weekly things, this is the refrigerant. Now, as the refrigerant which by the way is liquid nitrogen Comes down through these tears, it gets colder and colder and colder until it reaches the bottom. Now the bottom is where the quantum processor is kept.
Speaker 2:So all of this is that, you see, right here. All of that is really just signals and cryogenics to keep the thing cold. And the reason that the quantum processor at the very bottom of this has to be so cold is Because it has to achieve near absolute zero, to achieve Superconductivity. Only then can quantum activity happen. So at close to zero degrees Kelvin the most atomic motion stops right, and so at that point you can then start to Manipulate these atoms and get the quantum measurements that you want. So at 15 millikelvin, just above Absolute zero, that's colder than outer space. Quantum computer is probably the coldest thing in the known universe.
Speaker 1:And is it liquid helium or liquid nitrogen?
Speaker 2:liquid helium, liquid nitrogen, doesn't get cold enough. So can you give us an example of how big this is, to scale by feet tall, and the reason that you're gonna see that it is usually suspended from a ceiling or from a superstructure, not from a ceiling, from a superstructure it's usually, and it's usually off the floor, because if they put it on the floor it's gonna pick up way too many vibrations, which is gonna completely screw up the quantum measurement. So they have to suspend it from a superstructure and try to isolate it from the outside world, to reduce vibrations, to reduce noise. And what you're seeing here also is the quantum computer opened up much like a computer, with your case off. Over top of this will be a shroud that will further Shield it from the outside elements?
Speaker 1:Do they put LED lights on them like a cool gaming computer?
Speaker 2:They, they should. It would look beautiful if these whole things were like LEDs, like blue and green and maybe like a rainbow pattern. But no, they couldn't do that because it would, wouldn't just not work. So that gets introduced to sort of fit, sort of physical like what a quantum computer looks like, what it's made of and the just a really high-level basics. Let's talk a little bit about why that matters.
Speaker 2:So we had talked earlier a bit about superposition at 300 qubits. We talked earlier like a hundred qubits that a quantum computer could do. What was it like? Over a non-million number of values at 300 qubits a quantum computer can represent 10 to the 90th possible states simultaneously. Now that is, that represents more particles than are in the known universe. So it's just astronomically number, astronomically high and high number if you, if you think you can imagine that number, you really can't. It's um, it's absolutely enormous quantity. And what makes it so interesting is that we can do this. Today IBM already has a quantum computer with 433 qubits. So by virtue of that, ibm has a quantum computer that can represent more values Simultaneously than there are atoms in the known universe.
Speaker 2:Needless to say, conventional computers can't process Information that quickly, much less hold it in memory like a quantum machine can. Quantum machines don't really need the memory for it. It's just the way if their mechanics works. However, it's worth noting that Although they can hold such an enormous number of values, they can't report all of them at the same time. You can go in and read one of those values, but by the nature of quantum mechanics, when you read that value, you change it and so you can read one. You can read a value and it gives you back that value in. All the other data disappears.
Speaker 2:So they have to build other algorithms and put other electronics around it and play some very clever tricks to get the value that they want out of that sheer number of possibilities. And that's where the math just gets out of control, which I won't go into today, in large part because I can't. It's probably obvious by now that maybe a quantum computer isn't a brute force device. It just works on different physics, right? So with today's computers you can throw supercomputers at it, just throw more processors at it, more memory, bigger circuits and just kind of brute force your way through it. Quantum is a lot more elegant than that, because it's just doing things much differently and it's just enormously parallel, and so incalculable problems become possible to solve.
Speaker 4:Hey Bill, will quantum ever be able to tell us how many licks it takes to get to the center of a tutsuba?
Speaker 2:I love the throwback to the 80s. I love it. That little owl, yeah, no, that's good stuff, but we will talk about what quantum will allow us to do going forward, although I think that question will always be elusive. It can, of course, solve problems in quantum chemistry, quantum physics. It's what it was designed to do. That's the whole reason that quantum computers were developed was to solve those types of quantum mechanical problems. And the reason it can do that and everything else below it is because quantum computers are really really good at spotting periodic structures, and I'm going to talk about why that's important for cryptography too.
Speaker 2:But computers are not that good at spotting those types of structures, but the way that they developed the algorithm was for quantum. It picks it up quite easily. The other one that it can do really good is healthcare, Drug discovery. It can diagnose diseases. It can predict diseases in people. Based on that pattern recognition, based on seeing those structures, will be used for machine learning and artificial intelligence. A lot of the machine learning today is assisted supervised learning. Quantum will be able to make that unsupervised Again, by spotting those structures In the same way a person would, a quantum computer can kind of do it in an automated fashion, thereby improving the outcomes of the AI results. Cybersecurity has a huge role to play. Again, I'll keep teasing the encryption. We're going to get to it, but I saw a bouncer over that. But it also is really good at detecting anomalies and traffic flows and other behaviors. It will be used in financials for market predictions. It will be used in meteorology to model climate and forecast changes in weather patterns.
Speaker 3:If it's unsupervised. I interpret that to mean it's going to be out gathering data or inputs on its own, versus what we do today with ML and AI, where you need a data set that you kind of feed it and it's going to have access to a whole bunch of data in order to come back with the outputs. This will be, I'm going to say, self-learning, for lack of a better term.
Speaker 2:Close to it. There's a little bit of a nuance on that, I think, and that is that not necessarily just kind of set it loose and it kind of figures it out on its own, but you would still point it at a data set. You can make the data set as large as you want, but you wouldn't necessarily have to come back to it and say, oh no, no, I don't mean, you interpreted this wrong. I don't mean this way. With quantum computing and with pattern recognition and in quantum just recognizing the structures of knowledge, it should be able to get most of that right most of the time. But you would still need to kind of just point it at a data set, however large you wanted it to be.
Speaker 3:Interesting. So conceptually I could point it at the intranet period and then say go write my term paper on whatever subject, and then it generates, it brings it back and I get an A.
Speaker 2:Well, yeah, what you're describing sort of sounds like chat GPP, for sure, but chat GPP doesn't also doesn't recognize the differences between true and false knowledge, whereas quantum can help to bridge that gap.
Speaker 3:Okay, got it. Thank you, sir Yep.
Speaker 2:So we talked about the all the benefits of quantum. There are still some things holding it back, though. I hinted earlier that quantum was susceptible to interference and hence it was shielded and it was raised off the floor. That's a very big problem. So it is susceptible to electromagnetic fields, it is susceptible to heat, it is susceptible to sound, vibration, pretty much anything, anything at all. So just walking, getting too close to I mean it's susceptible to photonics, so just kind of getting too close to a quantum computer can interrupt its flow. So you tend to find these very sheltered in rooms with a whole bunch of shielding around them. In fact, even for even quantum computers that are encased in, say, lead, they are. They are impacted by the natural radioactive decay of these elements.
Speaker 2:Therefore, you have to have really really clever error correction circuitry to recognize errors when they happen because of these uncontrollable situations and account for that and adjust the responses. We referenced some of the limitations in measuring the states. So I said before, it can handle a vast quantity of information, but when you read that information then it disappears and so you can capture kind of like one value at a time basically, and so you have to work with that as well. These are extensive machines.
Speaker 2:You tend to find quantum computers with big and I'm going to talk about who has these but with agencies, countries and companies that have the pockets to afford them and they require a lot of cryogenics. So again, like most of what you see in a quantum computer, very little of it is the processing, most of it is just everything to support it. And it's not a computer like this. It doesn't just do this by itself, it interfaces with a regular computer, so it passes all this information to a regular computer that then manipulates it to be digested. It's not just digested by human minds, but just the power that has to go into a quantum machine to cryogenically pull it down to absolute zero is pretty significant. So really over 90% of the power that goes into quantum is around the cooling and very little is actually required for the processing itself.
Speaker 3:So then, Bill let's assume all of the merits you've described are true in this type of processing is going to deliver on all the things you kind of laid out. If the cost, though, to get there is so large, is there truly a practical use case in the commercial market? As everyone looks at the cost of ownership, will this ever be a viable option on a larger scale?
Speaker 2:It will be. It's an investment that will yield returns, and usually in pretty quick order. So it'll accelerate workloads dramatically and it'll help companies find solutions a lot quicker. Let's say you're a pharmaceutical firm and you are researching your next pharmaceutical. Say you want to research your next antibacterial drug. Antibacterials are not usually very hugely profitable drugs, but with a regular computer let's say you have a supercomputer it'll take you years and years to get there. It's an adequately powered quantum machine that gets reduced to weeks, days, potentially hours.
Speaker 2:So you save yourself a whole lot of time and you also got to market more quickly than your competitor has.
Speaker 3:And so if I'm IBM, I am selling compute time to those industries that are trying to solve these really big problems, and that's how I commercialize it.
Speaker 2:Yes, and you bring up a great point, which is that quantum capabilities are available in the cloud with some caveats. So companies like IBM will make their quantum capabilities available, provided that you're a friendly actor. So you're generally not going to make it available to some certain nation states. But yeah, you can do it that way, or you can just buy your own. Some companies have very deep pockets, and Booz Allen Hamilton has a quantum machine, hitachi has one, so you won't find them just at IBM.
Speaker 4:I'd also add to what Allen said and wonder about the rate of development and the rate of maturity. So Moore's Law says that computing power doubles every year to two. So I wonder if quantum has a similar trajectory or if anybody has even tried to guess at the rate of quantum development yet. Do you know, bill?
Speaker 2:Yes, the people have predicted the rate of quantum growth based on past growth, and in 2030, they're about National Institute of Standards and Technology believe that there will exist a quantum computer capable of breaking RSA encryption, which is where I think we're headed next.
Speaker 1:Was an RSA encryption already broken.
Speaker 2:No, not RSA 2048. Like some, maybe some smaller bit sizes of RSA, but 2048 still remains secure.
Speaker 1:I thought they had a back door into that. Wasn't there a scandal or whatever on that a couple of years ago?
Speaker 2:Not that I'm aware of, the RSA 2048 is still one of the preferred encryption technologies used for today's TLS, so hopefully there's no back door, because that would be a huge problem. So this is the exact. You guys are great. You guys are just taking me exactly where we're going every step of the way. So we'll ask. We got two slides. I'm going to talk about the encryption that's vulnerable and then I'm going to talk about the answers to that and I'm talking about. So let's talk about vulnerabilities. First, rsa 2048, which is used widely for TLS and VPN connections, is will soon be vulnerable to encryption, nist believes. Another one that will be vulnerable is elliptic curve, and elliptic curve is used for Bitcoin transactions. And then Diffie Hellman, which is also used for TLS as well as other things. So to give you an idea of how difficult these algorithms are to crack the Frontier supercomputer, which is a collaboration between HP, amd and others. It resides in Tennessee. It's the most powerful supercomputer in the world today. I'm sure that'll be replaced by something else in 12 months.
Speaker 2:It would take it billions of years to crack that Again, because you're really trying to deal with factoring large prime numbers, which neither classical computers nor people are good at doing. It's enormously time consuming task. Quantum today will also take billions of years to crack any of those algorithms that you see listed above. But in 2030, nist believes that there may be a quantum machine that might take a few hours to crack it, based on the rate of growth that we're seeing. So in 98, two qubits. Today, 433 qubits. Ibm is expected to release a quantum machine this year. Yet I think it's Condor we're going to get there that has over 1,000 qubits. So we're seeing this not quite exponential growth yet, but we're seeing this march towards much, much more powerful computers.
Speaker 2:Now here's why this matters. It's reasonable today to say well, quantum computers can't crack the encryption that I use on websites. So you go to website HTTPS, you log into your bank, you log into your healthcare provider or whatever it is, and you can feel reasonably safe over that connection. Feel safe insofar as no one's going to crack just like brute force crack the encryption between you and your destination. However, rest assured that there are countries and other bad actors who are collecting that information and they're storing it and then, when they have a powerful enough machine to break it, they're going to come back and they're going to break that encryption and then they'll have information.
Speaker 2:Now, some of the information may be stale, but some of it won't be so stale. So encrypted images of military installations seven, eight years from now might be really helpful. Information about those private messages that one politician sent to another seven years from now, oh yeah, they'll be really helpful for blackmail, right? So that's going to be a problem. They've already got the information. It's just a matter of time before they can read it.
Speaker 4:So RSA is used only basically to exchange keys in TLS, right, so we don't encrypt the entire contents of your web browsing session with RSA encryption. We use it to exchange a key and then, like AES or some more efficient symmetric algorithm, is used to encrypt the actual transit in transit, and perfect forward secrecy is a way to try to decouple that initial key that is exchanged with RSA from the encryption of the rest of the transit session.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 4:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Thank you. Thank you for explaining that to me too, because I wasn't very familiar with perfect forward secrecy. But the way you explain it is yes, and here's why. So AES 128 and 256 are both quantum safe. So let's define quantum safe. It is that no efficient known algorithm classical or quantum can invert the function being used to protect the data. So you have a hash function or an encryption function with this algorithm. You can't just reverse it and say, oh, that's the answer.
Speaker 2:Here are the current quantum safe encryption technologies today, and this is not an exhaustive list. The big ones SHA-256, aes 128 and 256 and RSA-4096. Rsa 2048, still quantum safe. I'm just saying that RSA-4096 will probably still be quantum safe in 2030 because you're just you're increasing the bit length. You are making it more difficult for a quantum computer to break it. Likewise, aes 128 and 256 could theoretically be quantum safe indefinitely, because all you really need to do is just increasing the bit size. So it could be AES 384 or 512. And that will just make it exponentially more difficult to solve.
Speaker 2:However, the National Institute of Standards and Technology is leaving nothing to chance, so in 2016, they invited mathematicians and scientists around the world to submit their plans for new encryption techniques that would be quantum safe by the definition provided above, which means it needs to be safe from a classical attack as well. A lot of submissions came. Some of them were thrown out. There was one submission that was cracked with a regular PC given enough time, so they're clearly not going to work. There were a couple of submissions that went well into round three and then finally failed because it was cracked. But four of them rose to the top For general encryption Crystal's Kyber has already been named a solution and for digital signatures to verify people's identities crystal xyliphyum, falcon and stinks, or the three that rose to the top.
Speaker 2:All of these are going to be available, probably in 2024. And then they should be deployable then. The reason there are so many of them and, by the way, there's more coming. So there's going to be a round two, and the round two will focus on general encryption only. They've already got enough digital signature solutions, so you're going to see things getting added to the crystal kyber.
Speaker 2:But let me talk about some of the differences here. So three of these four use cryptography that's predicated on lattice mathematics, and I'm going to talk about what that is. And then the last one, stinks plus is a hash-based algorithm, and the reason that NIST did this is because they wanted two completely different solutions. So in case lattice-based cryptography is cracked, well, they can fall back on stinks plus and have a hashing algorithm which so far still works fine, given enough key length. So here's what lattice-based mathematics is.
Speaker 2:It's really fascinating stuff. Imagine, if you will, you've got yourself a sheet of 8 1 1⁄2 sheet of grid paper and now imagine that you make that three-dimensional. So instead of just length and width, now you've got depth. Now I want you to expand that, blow it up to say 100 miles wide and 100 miles deep. Now I want you to add 1,000 dimensions to it. So now you've got this 1,000-dimensioned, huge, 100-mile-wide deep and high grid, and the problem that you're being asked to solve is to find the shortest point between A and B within that structure. That is enormously difficult for anything known to do because there is no periodic structure to it. The classical computer can't really figure that out and a quantum computer can't figure that out. That's lattice-based mathematical cryptography.
Speaker 4:Bill, quick question about that. Is that the shortest distance? I don't want to say linearly, but linearly thinking in three-dimensional space. Or is it the shortest distance following some route through the network, let's say 90 degree angles between nodes, if that makes sense?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think it is the second one where you're trying to follow the nodes Interesting.
Speaker 1:Can you create a wormhole between the two?
Speaker 2:You should be able to given this topic.
Speaker 4:That's how we crack this, that's right.
Speaker 2:Let's patent that. And the third quantum-safe encryption for discussion here is around photonics. This one's really interesting because it uses the principle of quantum mechanics in which as soon as you observe something you change it. So with photonics it's more of a detective technique, it's not a prevention technique. So you encrypt something strongly, but if someone is eavesdropping on it you will know, because the qubits within that transmission are entangled. So if you impact one of those photons, one of those particles, then you will impact the other and then you will know that someone is eavesdropping on your data. Now I don't think we talked too much about entanglement, but entanglement is the phenomenon in quantum mechanics in which any changes to one particle it's sister particle, regardless of distance. So they can be infinitely far apart, and that's going to happen.
Speaker 1:I feel like we need a dad joke in here, or to talk about Nick's cats.
Speaker 2:To lighten the mood, to bring it up the level.
Speaker 1:You were just talking about some sort of a sheet of paper that had 1,000 dimensions and 1,000 miles wide and deep.
Speaker 2:Well, this is crazy stuff and I'm not a mathematician, but this is really fascinating stuff to look into. It just really boggles because of these. When we're talking about quantum, we really are talking about this multi-dimensional computing, and it's crazy.
Speaker 4:I've got something for us. I've got some quantum jokes. Can I just interject these once in a while?
Speaker 2:Absolutely yeah.
Speaker 4:So there's three types of people in the world those who understand quantum computing, those who don't understand quantum computing and those who simultaneously do and do not understand quantum computing.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think I might be more of the third, but just barely understanding it myself. So actually, let's lighten the mood a little bit here. So we're going to come back up and talk about countries with quantum. You'll see a fairly familiar list here. I don't think there's any big surprises in this list. Maybe the Netherlands a little bit. Probably 95% of quantum is happening in the United States, Canada and China. In terms of the power that they have Within the United States, IBM is really leading the field. They're very public about their quantum capabilities. Some news came out of China earlier this year in which they claimed to have already broken RSA 2048. But that was immediately met with a lot of skepticism, and so it appears that is not the case. They do not have a computer capable of doing that, but it's still something that we're watching for 2030.
Speaker 1:And what is RSA again?
Speaker 2:I forget the names of the three scientists who developed it, but it's an encryption technology that's used for asymmetric encryption to transmit traffic from over the internet. So, as opposed to a symmetric encryption algorithm like AES, rsa is asymmetric, in which we're using a public key and a private key.
Speaker 4:And real quick. To add to that, the beauty of public key cryptosystems or asymmetric encryption is that you can reach a shared key across an insecure channel like the internet and you can have somebody sitting in the middle watching all the traffic going in both directions and they can't arrive at the same key. So it basically makes internet commerce and trusted communications possible. For anybody who's never met somebody else in a park or in a parking garage after dark to secretly exchange that key, we can, in the light of day, two people can get a secure session going with no prior contact or communication.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:I feel like I'm studying for the CISSP. You guys have all experienced this, I'm sure, where you go to some sort of family dinner or gathering of people that aren't in security and they start asking you what you do and you go down this long kind of diatribe about something that you're working on, that you're really into, and they just glaze over and they have no idea what you're talking about because you're using these acronyms that nobody really understands, right? I wonder what these poor quantum scientists do, because anywhere they go, they're talking about stuff that, like, a handful of people really grasp.
Speaker 2:I presented the same deck at my last family outing this past Memorial Day. No one was interested.
Speaker 3:Yeah, you found yourself sitting alone at some point.
Speaker 2:Yeah, right, yeah, I'm not invited back. So here are some of the companies with quantum computers today. I think it's an interesting list. Again, there aren't many big surprises on here. I do want to point out that a lot of universities have quantum right and it's not surprising. But it's interesting that today's students are learning this and they're fiddling with it in the lab and they're part of the tip of the spear when it comes to this type of research.
Speaker 1:And I'm sure nation states have it. Is it just not publicized?
Speaker 2:They do. Us Department of Energy has quantum. You better believe the NSA has quantum. And then, yeah, nation states, china, russia, yes, they have quantum. And there's a race. There's a race to get to a quantum computer that is sufficiently large enough to do some real damage, which is where I'm going. So let's talk through IBM's Quantum Roadmap. So in 2019, they introduced Falcon. That was 27 qubits. Today they're on Condor 1121. They're actually going to be introducing Condor. I don't think it's out yet. It should be coming later this year. Right now they're still sitting on 433. And by 2026, they really want to get above 10,000 qubits. But IBM has a very defined roadmap for how they can scale their capabilities.
Speaker 2:Bill are you aware of who comes up with these names? No, but I love Cucubora. If my next pet would absolutely be named Cucabora.
Speaker 2:So, yeah, so. So yeah, let's get into that right now. So where is this going? Cubits will continue to increase. I think things become very useful. At about 10,000 qubits you can.
Speaker 2:This starts to have some real world applications and some of the things that we just mentioned. You know some of like automotive industry, any any business industry to solve, to solve, you know, complex problems. But after like a thousand qubits or so, ibm believes that the machines will have to be linked fiber-optically, so in other words, horizontally scaled right, as opposed to continually try to vertically scale the. The quantum computer itself is going to be more difficult because trying to get that many perfect qubits into a single processor is really tough. So horizontally scaling is probably going to be the way it's going to go. They will benefit from more from more practical superconductors, maybe superconductors that don't have to be so aggressively cooled or there are other methods to make them work.
Speaker 2:Do expect some performance innovations outside of qubits. So I mentioned earlier that quantum computers are also connected to conventional computers. They work in tandem. We'll probably end up seeing more of that, where a classical computer will be brought to bear to facilitate some of the some of the results that come from the quantum machine and also expect new ways of measuring workloads, because I mean, it's never enough to measure something one way. I think qubit will become a very vague term. Already there are. Qubits can have variations in their quality. So some qubits can be highly fault tolerant, others less so, and the highly fault tolerant qubits are more powerful, right. So you have to keep an eye on that as well. But not all qubits are created equal. I think quantum computers will be functional. I think most people agree that quantum computers will be functional coming up, but really its potential is still you know, we're still trying to figure that out.
Speaker 4:Bill, do you know anything? Any applications where classical computers are expected to still be better than quantum going forward? Oh, yeah, probably at the right scales.
Speaker 2:Yeah, sure. So really anything that doesn't, that doesn't have any periodic structure to look at. You know things that are highly randomized, where it requires you know if they're getting highly randomized input, a classical computer is going to excel at that because there's just no structure to go out and find. So gaming is going to be one example.
Speaker 1:Would it change potentially how cryptocurrency works? Because today cryptocurrency is solving, you know racing to solve a complex problem over a period of time and then you know getting cryptocurrency as a reward for solving that problem Would quantum essentially disrupt that and potentially cause like a fork?
Speaker 2:So what you're talking about there is proof of work, and, yeah, quantum computing will absolutely impact proof of work, because proof of work is, I mean, it's they're trying to find these large, these large prime numbers. Quantum's good at that. So, yeah, it will disrupt any type of proof of work. Crypto that works on big primes, didn't?
Speaker 1:Ethereum move to proof of stake. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Ethereum too. Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:And when we talk about quantum, just to go back to the beginning, quantum is the state of the atom that it's in. What atom is it?
Speaker 2:So they use different elements for the superconductivity. Off the top of my head, I don't recall. I remember seeing this. I don't recall specifically what elements they use in their superconductor, but that's yeah, they're just using, they're taking an element that superconduct very, very well and they use the atoms within that.
Speaker 1:Is it the proton, the neutron or the electron?
Speaker 2:I believe with the I think they're changing the electrons, but there again I'm not sure it's. Now we're getting into a level that I'm not sure what part specifically of the atom that they're following, but I think it's the electron. Do we have any more quantum jokes?
Speaker 4:Yeah, so an electron was pulled over by the quantum state patrol and the officer walks up to the car and says do you know how fast you were going, to which the electron responds no, but I know where I am.
Speaker 2:I'm going to try these out on my kit, yeah, so.
Speaker 4:I'll hate them.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Well, Bill, thank you very much. Very deep topic and you certainly have done your research.
Speaker 2:Pleasure presenting it to you, a really interesting topic. I would encourage anyone, if you want to learn more about this, to check out your resources on the internet. Youtube has some, some, some fantastic things from your favorite physicists. Once you certainly recognize, and they go into this it's, they take it into different areas.
Speaker 1:Nick, last time we were talking about our favorite physicist. My name is Brian Cox and Dr Miku Kaku. Did you come up with a favorite physicist?
Speaker 4:You know about 10 minutes ago I had the same thought and I, you know I didn't get around to it. So that's homework for next time, how about?
Speaker 4:you Scott Feynman's Cool. He actually wrote a book called you Can't Be Serious or something like that, and it was like just kind of physics humor not just cheap jokes like these, but like just kind of a really like approachable, humorous book about physics. I think it was written in like the 60s or something, so it's pretty dated now, but he was just like a genuinely cool guy. Are we still recording? We are Okay, never mind, I'll talk to you later. Tell you some Richard Feynman story.
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