Quantum Computing

One of the challenges with the current state of cryptology is that quantum computing breaks most of the current forms of crypto, a point made in this twitter exchange a few days ago:

So what is the state of quantum computing?

Well according to this piece in Nature, moving along quite nicely.

According to Leo Kouwenhoven of the University of Delft in the Netherlands, “2017 is the year of braiding”, meaning that “excitations of matter … encode infor­mation by tangling around each other like braids. Information stored in these qubits would be much more resistant to outside disturbance than are other technologies and would, in particular, make error correction easier.”

That’s a lot to grok and I am not entirely sure that I grok it. But as Nature points out, big tech companies like Google and Microsoft are investing heavily in quantum computing and there is a non-trivial chance that we will get to viable quantum computing in the next decade.

As I said in my tweet reply, that would be pretty disruptive.