For someone with a deeply scientific job, Gil Herrera has a nearly mystical mandate: Look into the future and then shape it, at the level of strange quantum physics and inextricable math theorems, to the advantage of the United States.
Herrera is the newly minted leader of the National Security Agency’s Research Directorate. The directorate, like the rest of the NSA, has a dual mission: secure American systems and spy on the rest of the world. The budget is classified, a secret among secrets, but the NSA is one of the world’s largest spy agencies by any measure and Herrera’s directorate is the entire US intelligence community’s biggest in-house research and development arm. The directorate must come up with solutions to problems that are not yet real, in a world that doesn’t yet exist.
In his first interview since getting the job, Herrera lays out the tech—and threats—his group will now be focusing on. His priorities show how much the NSA’s targets are changing, balancing its work surveilling terror groups with an appreciation of how rapidly the geopolitical landscape has shifted in recent years. And he explains why the rise of new technologies, in terms of both threat and opportunity, are at the heart of what his group must contend with. Read More
Tag Archives: Quantum
Countdown To Bitcoin’s End — Crypto-Breaking Quantum Computers Are Closer Than You Think
Born on January 3, 2009, bitcoin is a little over one decade old. Yet a surprising number of people believe this first-generation cryptocurrency is immutable and indestructible. A little over a decade in, and some are proclaiming its the new gold. But with the accelerating growth in quantum computing power, how long can bitcoin’s reputation remain untarnished? Truth is, the threat to bitcoin’s integrity may be approaching far faster than most people realize. From a 30,000 foot perspective, bitcoin might just be a short blip in the history books, just like many of the fiat currencies that have come and gone.
… Many crypto enthusiasts are proclaiming that bitcoin is the new gold. Bitcoin is a legitimate store of value because its unbreakable. After all, it has an entire 12 year track record behind it.
… But a whole 12 years into “immutable” and there’s already a slight glitch in bitcoin’s armor. Algorithms that can decipher bitcoin’s private keys already exist. Shor’s algorithm and Grover’s algorithm, devised in 1994 and 1996 respectively, can be used to challenge asymmetric cryptography and hashing — the two mechanisms that secure a blockchain. And although we still don’t have computers powerful enough to execute these algorithms, most experts believe its not a question of if, but when this day will come. Read More
How a Simple Crystal Could Help Pave the Way to Full-Scale Quantum Computing
Vaccine and drug development, artificial intelligence, transport and logistics, climate science—these are all areas that stand to be transformed by the development of a full-scale quantum computer. And there has been explosive growth in quantum computing investment over the past decade.
Yet current quantum processors are relatively small in scale, with fewer than 100 qubits— the basic building blocks of a quantum computer. Bits are the smallest unit of information in computing, and the term qubits stems from “quantum bits.”
While early quantum processors have been crucial for demonstrating the potential of quantum computing, realizing globally significant applications will likely require processors with upwards of a million qubits.
Our new research tackles a core problem at the heart of scaling up quantum computers: how do we go from controlling just a few qubits, to controlling millions? In research published today in Science Advances, we reveal a new technology that may offer a solution. Read More
The Dawn of the Quantum Internet
Introducing Qiskit: Using Quantum Computers to Improve Machine Learning
Today, machine learning applications touch almost every angle of business, science, and private life, ranging from speech and image recognition to generative models to improve drug design. Machine learning’s primary goal is to train computers to make sense of an ever-expanding pool of data. However, in order to learn from these increasingly complex datasets, the underlying models, such as deep neural networks, also become more sophisticated and expensive to train.
This results in complicated models with very long training times that risk over-fitting without sufficient generalization. In other words, we must be vigilant that our models meaningfully understand our data, rather than merely memorizing what they have already seen. Therefore, a lot of effort is put into improving training algorithms of models, as well as dedicated classical hardware. Read More
Deterministic multi-qubit entanglement in a quantum network
The generation of high-fidelity distributed multi-qubit entanglement is a challenging task for large-scale quantum communication and computational networks1,2,3,4. The deterministic entanglement of two remote qubits has recently been demonstrated with both photons5,6,7,8,9,10 and phonons11. However, the deterministic generation and transmission of multi-qubit entanglement has not been demonstrated, primarily owing to limited state-transfer fidelities. Here we report a quantum network comprising two superconducting quantum nodes connected by a one-metre-long superconducting coaxial cable, where each node includes three interconnected qubits. By directly connecting the cable to one qubit in each node, we transfer quantum states between the nodes with a process fidelity of 0.911 ± 0.008. We also prepare a three-qubit Greenberger–Horne–Zeilinger (GHZ) state12,13,14 in one node and deterministically transfer this state to the other node, with a transferred-state fidelity of 0.656 ± 0.014. We further use this system to deterministically generate a globally distributed two-node, six-qubit GHZ state with a state fidelity of 0.722 ± 0.021. The GHZ state fidelities are clearly above the threshold of 1/2 for genuine multipartite entanglement15, showing that this architecture can be used to coherently link together multiple superconducting quantum processors, providing a modular approach for building large-scale quantum computers16,17. Read More
How quantum computers could hack our brains with fake memories like Total Recall
Quantum computers, according to experts, will one day be capable of performing incredible calculations and nearly unfathomable feats of logic. In the near future, we know they’ll help us discover new drugs to fight disease and new materials to build with. But the far future potential for these enigmatic machines is as vast as the universe itself.
…. Reality, one way or another, boils down to whatever our brains believe it is. And this makes the idea of altering our memories, and thus our realities, all the more appealing – or terrifying, depending on how you look at it. Read More
Anatomy Of A Quantum Machine Learning Algorithm
What is a Variational Quantum-Classical Algorithm and why do we need it?
… Variational Quantum-Classical Algorithms have become a popular way to think about quantum algorithms for near-term quantum devices. In these algorithms, classical computers perform the overall machine learning task on information they acquire from running certain hard-to-compute calculations on a quantum computer.
The quantum algorithm produces information based on a set of parameters provided by the classical algorithm. Therefore, they are called Parameterized Quantum Circuits (PQCs). Read More
Get the book: Hands-On Quantum Machine Learning With Python.
A fridge that’s colder than outer space could take quantum computing to new heights
Quantum computing is nearing a ‘tipping point’, says CEO of Oxford Quantum Circuits. The arrival of powerful new refrigerators will allow organizations to take quantum computing to new heights, by improving the “quality” of superconducting quantum bits (qubits). Read More
Here’s Why Quantum Computing Will Not Break Cryptocurrencies
There’s a lurking fear in cryptocurrency communities about quantum computing. Could it break cryptocurrencies and the encryption that protects them? How close might that be? Do the headlines around “quantum supremacy” mean that my private keys are at risk?
The simple answer: no. But let’s dive deeper into this phenomenon and really try to understand why this is the case and how quantum computing will interact with cryptocurrencies. Read More
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