Chats on the Charles

Sometimes it takes fiction to chronicle reality.  I recently read a new novel from David Ignatius, one of my favorite spy novelists.  The book highlights an escalating arms race currently underway in the emerging field of quantum computing.  David, leveraging his national security beat at the Washington Post, uses as backdrop a global rivalry that is on par with the nuclear and space competition of the mid to late twentieth century.  This time the protagonists are China and the United States, and at stake is dominance over the entire digital infrastructure and, therefore, the world economy.

Our assets, identities and privacy rely on digital encryption. The wealth we have is stored in computers as bits. The property rights that validate our ownership of homes reside in government computers as code. Transportation infrastructure, nuclear plants, hospital machines, banking transactions and most aspects of our digital lives cannot function without highly secure encryption.  Encryption technologies typically rely on a classical mathematics problem to provide digital security.  This large prime number factoring problem is virtually impossible for even the fastest and most sophisticated current computers to solve.  Not so for quantum computers.

Traditional computers consist of millions of bits that can only be in one discrete stage (a 0 or 1) at a given time.  However, in quantum computing each bit (a qubit) can be either a 0 or 1 or both or any number in between at the same time. This fundamental duality that underlies all quantum physics allows qubits to solve previously unsolvable problems of classical computing. These include algorithms that accurately analyze the interaction of genes, model complex chemical reactions, compute global weather patterns and, worryingly, crack prime number factoring based encryption. Whoever wins the race to build the first large scale quantum computer can assert digital dominance on a global scale.

These computers are extremely hard to build because qubits only show their quantum properties at extremely low temperatures. Creating and maintaining these machines is an engineering challenge that is still not fully solved.  Many of the early primitive versions of quantum computers remind me of the first large mainframe computers.  They will get better just like mainframes did.

United States and China’s competition for quantum computing talent and technology is reminiscent of the Cold War.  Leading American technology companies, in partnership with the relative new and secretive government agency IARPA, are currently in the lead.  China is making a concerted effort to catch up, and recently announced a $10 billion quantum computing center.  Our status as the sole global superpower may rely on us winning this contest.  Now that is a thriller worth reading about.