[Cryptography] EE380: How to Co mpute with Schrödinger's Cat: An Introduction to Quantum Computing

[Bill Frantz]

A nice introduction to the state of the art in quantum computing 
and insight into the issues practitioner are facing.

Available at: <https://youtu.be/cWGQZ-nMzZA>

Eleanor Rieffel     Wolfgang Polak
QuAIL,NASA Ames Research Center

The success of the abstract model of classical computation in 
terms of bits, logical operations, algorithms, and programming 
language constructs makes it easy to forget that computation is 
a physical process. Our cherished notions of computation and 
information are grounded in classical mechanics, but the physics 
of our universe is quantum. A natural question to ask is how 
computation would change if we adopted a quantum mechanical, 
instead of a classical mechanical, model of computation.

In the early 80s, Richard Feynman, Yuri Manin, and others 
recognized that certain quantum effect could not be simulated 
efficiently on conventional computers. This observation led 
researchers to speculate that some difficult computational 
problems could be solved efficiently using these 
hard-to-simulate quantum effects. Slowly, a new picture of 
computation arose, one that gave rise to a variety of faster 
algorithms, novel cryptographic mechanisms, and alternative 
methods of communication.

In the first part of the talk, we will introduce key concepts 
underlying quantum computing and describe alternative quantum 
computational models. In the second half of the talk, we will 
discuss applications of quantum computing, known advantages and 
limitations, and briefly touch on the current state-of-the-art 
in building quantum computers, quantum error correction, and 
fault tolerance, and the many open research questions that remain.

Cheers - Bill

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