Ryan Peterman

There are quantum error correcting codes, and that's part of the solution.

That's only one of the problems.

Just holding bits in superposition is hard.

There are many household technological issues and there's progress on that.

So this is one line of huge investment.

The other line comes from cryptography because, of course, everybody should be worried, right?

I mean, you know, forget quantum computers.

If tomorrow, I mean really tomorrow, somebody finds even a classical factoring algorithm in polynomial time, I think there will be chaos in the world because nobody can do any transactions because most security systems still rely on factoring.

And so, of course, we want to change the underlying assumptions of security.

We want to rely

The whole revolution in cryptography was that we arrest cryptography on computationally hard assumptions.

And with this we build all the wonderful public key systems and all the magical things you can do by assuming that players are computationally limited.

But now if the adversaries are quantum computers, then suddenly they can break this.

You want to find other mathematical problems, computational problems, which are somehow hard even to quantum computers.

So that's a whole field, this change, complexity theory and cryptography, there is an army of people who are just trying to invent problems.

I maybe should stress, one-way functions are easy to find.

I mean, most problems, most processes in nature are not easily reversible.

You make an omelet from an egg, you know, reversing this doesn't take the same amount of time.

That's a usual example of a physical binary function.

But trapdoor functions like factoring, problems from which you can build public key systems, and that's the most really basic thing for electronic commerce,