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Blockchain and Quantum Computing-3

The document discusses classical and quantum computation, noting that quantum computers are governed by quantum mechanics leading to dramatic computational differences. It provides examples like Deutsch's problem to demonstrate quantum computation can be faster than classical. The promise of quantum computation is obtaining such speedups broadly, which could impact systems relying on asymmetric computational difficulties like cryptography.

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Edward
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24 views1 page

Blockchain and Quantum Computing-3

The document discusses classical and quantum computation, noting that quantum computers are governed by quantum mechanics leading to dramatic computational differences. It provides examples like Deutsch's problem to demonstrate quantum computation can be faster than classical. The promise of quantum computation is obtaining such speedups broadly, which could impact systems relying on asymmetric computational difficulties like cryptography.

Uploaded by

Edward
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Introduction: Classical and Quantum Computation

Computing has revolutionized information processing and management. As far back as Charles
Babbage, it was recognized that information could be processed with physical systems, and more
recently (e.g. the work of Rolf Landauer) that information must be represented in physical form
and is thus subject to physical laws. The physical laws relevant to the information processing
system are important to understanding the limitations of computation. Traditional computing
devices adhere to the laws of classical mechanics and are thus referred to as “classical computers.”
Proposed “quantum computers” are governed by the laws of quantum mechanics, leading to a
dramatic difference in the computational capacity.
Fundamentally, Quantum Mechanics adds features that are absent in classical mechanics. To
begin, physical quantities are “quantized,” i.e. cannot be subdivided. For example, light is
quantized: the fundamental quantum of light is called the photon and cannot be subdivided into
two photons. Quantum mechanics further requires physical states to evolve in such a way that
cloning an arbitrary, unknown state into an independent copy is not possible. This is used in
quantum cryptography to prevent information copying. Furthermore, quantum mechanics
describes systems in terms of superpositions that allow multiple distinguishable inputs to be
processed simultaneously, though only one can be observed at the end of processing, and the
outcome is generally probabilistic in nature. Finally, quantum mechanics allows for correlations
that are not possible to obtain in classical physics. Such correlations include what is called
entanglement.
Many useful computational algorithms and data structures have been developed for use on classical
computers. Many of these algorithms have parallels on quantum computers but due to the quantum
mechanical nature of the information processing could have far greater power. The simplest
example of this is called Deutsch’s Problem, which demonstrates that quantum computation can
be significantly faster than classical computation. We are given a function that is either balanced
(equal number of outputs 0 and 1 for full set of inputs) or constant (returns same value regardless
of input), and we want to determine which is the case. For the classical case, we need to do two
calculations, one for each input value. For the quantum case, we only need to do one calculation
and the result is then known to be balanced or constant, though the output values are not identified
by the algorithm.
The general promise of quantum computation is that such speedups for specific difficult problems
can be obtained more broadly. Clearly this affects many areas of information science and
computation, where the functionality of a system is predicated on the difficulty of some
calculation. In such cases, a significant speedup can cause a system to break down. This is
especially true for cryptographic systems that rely on an asymmetry in computational effort to
evaluate a function and to evaluate its inverse. RSA encryption relies on the fact that multiplication
of large primes is easy and thus fast, but factoring large composite numbers into two prime factors
is very difficult and thus slow. Hash functions have the important property of being easy to
calculate but difficult to invert. They provide a quasi-unique fingerprint precisely because it is very
difficult to take a given hash value and find a chosen pre-image that yields that hash.

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