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Quantum computers have
a curious complex history
Among the many imaginative products
born in the creative minds of theoretical
physicists, quantum computers stand out.
They are devices that were conceived
in abstract terms long before they could
be actually built. Even today they exist
only in rudimentary forms. But one
such quantum computer “toy” has now
succeeded in solving a complicated quantum problem — the
energy levels of the hydrogen molecule — as freelance writer
Charles Petit reports in this issue (Page 28).
As Petit correctly notes, the potential for quantum com-
puters was predicted by Richard Feynman, one of the most
celebrated physicists of the 20th century. Feynman’s talk at a
1981 conference outlined the basic idea of using a computing
device based on quantum physics to simulate natural phe-
nomena more precisely than possible with ordinary comput-
ers. But Feynman was not, as some accounts imply, the first
to imagine a quantum-mechanical computer. A theorist at
Argonne National Laboratory, Paul Benioff, discussed the
idea in a paper prepared in 1979 and published in the Journal
of Statistical Physics in 1980. He showed that it was possible,
mathematically at least, for a quantum system to perform
computations — a proposition that many physicists doubted
at the time. “It is difficult to conceive how one would actually
build such a machine,” Benioff wrote. But his mathematical
model “at least suggests that the possibility of actually con-
structing such … machines should be examined.”
Despite Benioff and even Feynman’s exhortations, nobody
actually spent much effort trying to build a quantum com-
puter until someone identified a killer app: breaking the codes
that encrypt sensitive military and financial secrets. In 1994
mathematician Peter Shor devised an algorithm that showed
how a quantum computer could be just such a code breaker.
Of course, just as Feynman had been anticipated by Benioff,
Shor was beaten to the punch by Robert Redford. In the 1992
movie Sneakers, Redford and cohorts pursued a mysterious
little box with the power to decode all those secrets. Nobody
called it a quantum computer, but in retrospect, that’s clearly
what it was. It would have been a great story if Shor had been
inspired by the film to make his mathematical breakthrough,
but alas, he says he developed his algorithm without having
seen Sneakers. But his friends did make him watch it after his
algorithm appeared.
—Tom Siegfried, Editor in Chief
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