From owner-freebsd-chat  Mon Mar 23 08:46:42 1998
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From: "Jonathan M. Bresler" <jmb>
Message-Id: <199803231646.IAA17140@hub.freebsd.org>
Subject: time to up your pgp keys to 4096 bits?
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Date: Mon, 23 Mar 1998 08:46:38 -0800 (PST)
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saw this this morning:

Monday March 23 9:42 AM EST 

Science nearing breakthrough in quantum computing

SAN FRANCISCO (Wired) - Researchers at Los Alamos National Laboratory
believe they are just a few years away from reaching an elusive
goal in computing -- developing a working quantum computer.

In remarks before the annual meeting of the American Physical
Society, Los Alamos scientists described how they solved two critical
questions blocking the development of these devices: how long the
storage media will last, and how long it will take the computing
media to complete an operation.

A quantum computer is a device that replaces the zeros and ones of
PC binary data with photons or ions trapped by electromagnetic
fields.

Because they are encased in these fields, the ions are in a coherent
state for fractions of a second. The obstacle in using ions is that
they may lose their coherence too quickly to be useful as a computing
resource. The Los Alamos researchers have been able to apply a
single laser pulse to a single ion in an electromagnetic trap.

>From their demonstration, the researchers said that as many as
100,000 logic operations could be applied to registers that consist
of up to 50 trapped ions. It would take but a few microseconds for
a register to complete a single operation.

Although it is smaller and faster than any silicon-based device,
quantum computers are not expected to replace desktop PCs or
supercomputers. Instead, these machines would be dedicated to
specialized tasks such as generating keys for strong cryptography,
an operation that requires a computer to factor very large numbers.

(Reuters/Wired) 

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