The Quantum Computer - Old News

The Quantum Computer

Once upon a time the Internet began to flourish, and sharp programmers invented PGP (pretty good privacy) and other encryption software for free or for a very low cost. Because both good guys and bad guys send emails, many of which are sensitive enough to use encryption, the National Security Agency – which has always monitored ALL airborne and Internet communications – found it did not have the computer horsepower to decrypt millions of encrypted emails in real time. The answer was to develop even faster computers. Enter the first Quantum Computer developed to decrypt messages in real time.
In 1999 ( a long time ago in computer development terms) IBM was given a contract by NSA to develop the first practical quantum computer for message decryption. You do not have to be a religious person to recognize when a miracle has occurred.
For example:

Miracle #1: The CPU of the computer was comprised of five Freon atoms, and the RAM, or memory, was composed of the electrons in orbit around the atom. Freon is an inert gas and has a very stable atom, so doing anything unusual to the electrons would appear to be very odd, indeed. It also makes one wonder how you remove or extract just five atoms of any element from a body of more atoms.

Miracle #2+: How do you connect human interface devices, i.e., keyboard, a mouse, a printer and a video monitor? Of course I did not even mention how to program the computer.

Miracle #3: The quantum computer was not a binary computer, operating with logic zeroes and ones. This computer operated on the basis of the qubit. A qubit is a data bit which is somewhat of a miracle by itself. The qubit has the ability to be a logic 0, a logic 1, or both at the same time. Basic electronic data bit detection would see no data if a logic one were to be combined with a logic zero.

Miracle #4: We can be sure the NSA provided a competent code to break, and on the first effective clock cycle the code was broken!

Miracle #5: The quantum computer edscribed here had a clock speed estimated at several PetaFLOPS, or several billion trillion floating point operations per second. In 2004 newspapers touted the fastest commercial computer in the world – it was a billion times slower than the NSA computer mentioned here.

Miracle #6: We do not know exactly what this miracle is, but we do know that ten years following the development of the computer described here - what NSA is using now is another set of miracles.

Do you believe in magic?

Dr Lou Gamble