Scientific American: Is the U.S. Lagging in the Quest for Quantum Computing?

[Steve Kinney]

On 12/6/18 12:55 PM, jim bell wrote:
> Scientific American: Is the U.S. Lagging in the Quest for Quantum Computing?.
> https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/is-the-u-s-lagging-in-the-quest-for-quantum-computing/

I would find it hard to believe that the U.S. "lags" any other country
in its quest for quantum computer technology, given that the NSA can
make an ironclad case demanding blank checks for QC R&D:  Whoever gets
there first, preferably in secret, will make giant strides toward world
domination.  In addition to breaking PKI ciphers, QC would probably
enable breakthroughs in modeling complex systems, reducing many physical
problems presently requiring massively parallel, massively iterated
digital computation to de facto analog computations yielding nearly
instant answers.

"World domination" through QC would not include the ability to read all
of everyone's message traffic.  To date I have not heard anything
indicating that QC will break modern symmetric ciphers, but I have
information from unpublished sources indicating that the U.S. (therefore
probably others as well) still uses one time pads, and/or large single
use symmetric ciphers keys, for its most sensitive military
communications.  Scaling the activities in question up to cover all
sensitive State communications presents no technical challenges, only
financial ones.  Naturally, private individuals will be out in the cold
except for a handful of crypto geeks talking among themselves.






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